iini!. 



! 



ill! 



, ijlhli 







aassV4w4-l- 
Book^.O^:|__ 



THE AIMS OF TEACHING 
IN JEWISH SCHOOLS 



ISAAC M. WISE CENTENARY PUBLICATION 

OF THE TEACHERS' INSTITUTE of the 

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE 



The Aims of Teaching 
in Jewish Schools 

A HANDBOOK FOR TEACHERS 

BY 

RABBI LOUIS GROSSMANN, D. D. 

PRINCIPAI,, TEACHERS' INSTITUTE 
HEBREW UNION COI.I,EGE 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

DR. G. STANLEY HALL 

PRESIDENT, CI,ARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER. MASS. 



"i:Dn ^Si'h); iy:h yn 



CINCINNATI 
TEACHERS' INSTITUTE OF THE HEBREW UNION COI^IyEGE 

1919 



i^c 



G;1 



Copyright 1919, by 

Thk Teachers' Institute of the 

Hebrew Union CoIvI^ege 



TRANSFERRED FROM 
COPYRIGHT OFFieg 



MOV 22 m9 



oUN (dw ( -ji d 



©CI.A566698 



Dedicated to 
Isaac M. Wise 

AND 

Congregation Bnai Yeshurun 



PREFACE 

In view of the fact that religion is a central 
influence in life, the teaching of it is a prime 
concern. But no subject is so conventional 
and so slow to avail itself of large views and 
the efficient practice of modern education. 
Religious Pedagogy is a new science and 
still lacks both the dash of pioneers and 
the vision of innovators. These pages are 
offered as a modest contribution, in the 
hope that they may call attention to the 
possibilities which lie in the new Reform of 
Jewish Education, This reform will go deeper, 
I am certain, into the life of the Jews, because 
it will be more constructive than was the syn- 
agogal reform of fifty years ago. 

Louis Grossmann. 
Cincinnati, 
April 3, 1919. 



INTRODUCTION 

It has been a real inspiration to me to 
examine the proof of this book, which is by far 
the best treatise on reUgious pedagogy that has 
anywhere yet appeared. It places reUgious 
education on its proper scientific and con- 
structive basis. It is fitting that the Jews 
should take the leadership in this field, and this 
is the psychological moment for them to do so. 
I do not believe Rabbi Wise's Centenary could 
be celebrated in any better way or commemo- 
rated in any more fitting manner than by the 
adoption of some such splendid plan as this. 
Dr. Grossmann boldly and rightly takes, for 
the first time in this field, adequate account of 
our new knowledge of child nature and life. 
He finds fit place, too, in his scheme for biog- 
raphy, story-telling, and myth, music, nature 
and utilizes the kindergarten principle and 
adjusts the rich material to the successive 
stages in the child's psychic life and develop- 
ment. 

I am glad, too, to see the stress he lays upon 
the Hebrew language. In my long experience 
as a University teacher, who has had many 
Jewish students, I have come to regard the 



degree of familiarity which they had acquired 
in this language as, to some extent, an index of 
their docility in general. The library of books 
that constitute the Old Testament (and as a 
Christian I should like to be permitted to add 
those of the New) is the world's greatest text- 
book on pedagogy, and even their order in the 
canon follows in a masterly way the stages of 
the development of the child, which itself 
recapitulates that of the race. 

Education the world over was at first and for 
a long time almost solely religious, and, while 
it was once a master stroke of toleration to 
eliminate it from the school, in doing so we 
cut loose from genetic history and nearly lost 
from our educational system the greatest of all 
the motives that make for virtue, reverence, 
self-knowledge and self-control. Now we are 
beginning to realize the wrong we have com- 
mitted against child nature and are seeking in 
various ways to atone for it. 

If the Jewish leaders of this country can 
unite to put in operation some such scheme as 
is here set forth I should think they would be 
doing the greatest possible service to the inter- 
ests of their own race in keeping its priceless 
traditions vital and effective in the new world 
now opening to us, and would set an example 
not only to Protestants and Catholics to recon- 
struct their own methods to fit the needs of the 



new times, but would suggest to other stirpes 
and races in our country that to loyally con- 
serve their own past and to avoid the break 
with it which coming to~ this country often 
involves, they would make themselves thereby 
not less but more loyal Americans and be able 
to say of their own past that they could not 
love it so much, loved they not this country 
more. 

G. Stanley Hall. 
Clark University, 
March, 1919. 



CONTENTS. 

Preface r . . . 7 

Introduction by Dr. G. Stanley Hall 9 

The Kindergarten in the Religious School 13 

Third Grade 29 

Fourth Grade 49 

Fifth Grade 64 

Sixth Grade 82 

Seventh Grade 93 

Eighth Grade 124 

The Relation Between the Public School 

and the Religious School 149 

The Teacher and the Community 158 

Story Telling 160 

The Text Book 172 

Hebrew 181 

The Picture in the Religious School 194 

The Sabbath and the Holy Days 203 

Children's Services 216 

The School Entertainments and School 

Services 220 

Music in the Religious School 231 

Charily Collections in the Religious School 

and Charitableness 238 



THE KINDERGARTEN IN THE 
RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. 

FIRST AND SECOND GRADES. 

Whether or not the Kindergarten has a place 
in the ReHgious School is a debatable question. 
Some defend it, because, they say, religion 
cannot be taught too early ; everything depends 
on first influences; the child needs religion 
at once and should be given direction in it 
very early Others argue that the method 
of the Kindergarten is needed to give the 
Religious School the modern spirit, and they 
hope the Kindergarten will freshen up the 
mechanical way so hard on the children 
in the Religious School, and bring a salutary 
awakening to its teachers as well. There are 
finally those who urge that the Kindergarten 
be introduced into the Religious Schools for 
moral reasons. Just as the school must come 
to the aid of the home to compensate for the 
absence there of specific religious interest and 
activities, so the Kindergarten should supply 
to the children that awe for moral experiences 
which is the basis of individual and social 
life and which the modern home often fails 



14 AIMS OF TEACHING 

to give. All these reasons rest upon an un- 
warranted distrust of the home and an exag- 
gerated hope in mere school methods. Besides, 
it is not quite certain that the awe and the 
religious feeling which the Kindergarten is 
to superinduce in the little children would not 
eventually become artificial and false. 

THE SOBER SPIRIT IN RELIGIOUS 
INSTRUCTION. 

Children of the pre-school age cannot enter 
upon so high-leveled an emotion as that ol 
religious awe, and are likely to lapse into con- 
fusion and moral helplessness if they are forced 
to add one more to the many "fears" they have 
already. Nothing could be more calamitous 
than to set children adrift with darkening 
fear into the world of life. That is the way 
toward superstition and demoralization. If, 
on the other hand, the Kindergarten is 
meant to bring cheer and "sweetness" into the 
Religious School, because its traditional tone 
has been sober, we should go into judgment 
with ourselves as to this lack of the happier 
spirit. But we can find in this no sufficient 
reason to justify the extension of religious 
education to so early a child period. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 15 

THE CULTIVATION OF CHILD-FANCY. 

The Kindergarten has a place in secular edu- 
cation, because city childhood needs contact 
with nature and is entitled to less hindered 
freedom in play and association, but in the Re- 
ligious School the function of the Kindergarten 
is to aid the child soul to unfold from within, 
as it were, to give free scope to fancies and af- 
fections. This fine though difficult task is 
necessary today. We are accustomed to re- 
gard the religious school as a place for intel- 
lectual training preeminently, though we ought 
to concede that mental maturity is only one 
step in the process of religious growth. It is 
true that the child should be clear in its ways 
of thinking, because clarity is necessary for 
right decisions and correct adjustments in con- 
duct, and we must even check the imagination 
which often disturbs and confuses the mind. 
But when we deny children their natural right 
to linger on the wonderful, we commit a wrong 
against them, for we clog in their soul one of the 
fountains of their joy and hinder them in an 
essential phase of their spiritual development. 
If they are to have a well-rounded life, they 
must be allowed the delights of fancy, for an 
intelligent character will always seek oppor- 
tunities for admiration and wonder. 



16 AIMS OF TEACHING 

JUDAISM IS TOO PROSAIC. 

Admiration and wonder are necessary for 
religion and worship. Worship is the highest 
reach of admiration. A reHgion that does not 
encourage the instinct of admiration lacks 
one of the essential appeals to human nature. 
This statement is meant as a caution with re- 
gard to an intellectual religion such as Judaism. 
We modern Jews need to cultivate more 
of the esthetic and poetic side of character. 
Jewish religiousness and Jewish morals are 
too prosaically intellectual. There was a 
time when the Jewish people was more ideal- 
istic, as is seen in the fact that, as soon as the 
world's culture was opened to them, Jews took 
readily to those arts and professions in which 
the trained imagination is a qualification. It is 
incumbent on us to see to it that the Jew of the 
future will want to enter into intimacy with 
the great and the true and the good, will love 
and admire those who further these, and will 
be capable of and eager for free enthusiasm. 

THE JEWISH CHILD NEEDS TRAINING IN 
IMAGINATION. 

In the ultimate sense, religion is good 
taste, the sanest, the finest, the purest, the hap- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 17 

piest taste for life. Now, fancy is an absolute 
requisite for this, and free childhood is the 
most opportune period for the introduction 
of it into character. The Kindergarten 
teacher in the religious school should address 
herself to the task of enriching childhood with 
the interests, the loves and admirations that 
are outside of all text books and which text 
books can neither give nor cultivate. If the 
Kindergarten will adopt as its aim the cultiva- 
tion of the child imagination, it will meet a 
distinct need. Especially is this need apparent 
in the Jewish child, whose soul should be saved 
from lapsing into dull intellectualism, and in 
whose case the truth should apply most empha- 
tically that knowledge and character are stale 
without the condiment of fancy. 

SELFISHNESS IN THE KINDERGARTEN. 

Mention must be made of one more point 
as to the function of the Kindergarten in the 
religious school. It is as to the method of 
teaching before the child begins to form attach- 
ments to other children. One of the character- 
istics of the children of the Kindergarten is 
the fact that they form no friendships. It is 
the period of a naive separateness which often 
seems like individualism. While affectionate 



18 AIMS OF TEACHING 

toward the teachers, the child manifests aloof- 
ness toward other children. There is in this a 
natural expression of the preoccupation of the 
child, busy in satisfying its legitimate demands, 
but there is danger in this, if it be allowed to 
become inveterate. 

THE SOCIAL FACTS OF CHILD-LIFE. 

I say the child has legitimate needs at 
this period and we can readily see that this is 
so. It must know the world, the people, 
the things and the many elementary facts of 
life, so puzzling and absorbing to the young be- 
ginner. The questions the child asks show how 
seriously he takes facts and the flood of novel- 
ties that come into his way. They keep him 
busy, so that he cannot think nor feel himself 
into any attachments. Besides, he has already 
in his home and in his family those satisfactory 
alliances and congenialities which satisfy his 
social need. He does not as yet possess the "so- 
cial" sense, and he would not have any use for 
it, since his life is filled with merely domestic 
interests and influences. The extra-home rela- 
tions and the wider scope of life, which is 
hardly opened to him, will afford him occasions 
later for the friendships and the social feel- 
ings which are the very heart of religion. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 19 

THE MANNER OF TEACHING. 

So far as the manner of teaching is con- 
cerned, it is advisable to eliminate the "gifts," 
which in the secular Kindergarten have a sig- 
nificance they cannot have in religious educa- 
tion. The "action" of the class, during the 
development of the lesson, must have reference, 
of course, to its content, and should, by its 
dramatic representation by the children of 
their respective roles, evoke in them a realiza- 
tion of moral situations and thus be a dis- 
cipline for "thinking one's self into others," 
sharing similar and opposite sentiments, and 
for control of their too insistent whims. Adult 
morality is dependent upon this capacity, just 
as adult theology requires the ability to imagine 
another world and another life. 

It goes without saying that the Kindergarten 
child must not be contrained to "learning 
things by heart." "Learning things by heart" 
is a poor method all along the line of didactics 
and is a sin against childhood at this period. 
There ought to be at no time any pride in 
the ability to recite pieces, and it is dis- 
tinctly objectionable to mistake restatement 
of words for proof that the child has taken 
a moral lesson into its life and character. 
The Kindergarten class should not be a class in 



20 AIMS OF TEACHING 

which the recitation of cute bits of poetry is a 
specialty. The "pieces" do not constitute the 
reHgious lesson, even if the child should remem- 
ber them, but the spirit and the influence, 
engendered by the teacher's tactful suggestive- 
ness, do ; it is the active effort the child makes 
to think itself into the thought and to feel itself 
into the feelings of the members of the class 
and into the personalities of the story and the 
play, which constitute the lesson. This is in- 
deed hard, involves thoughtful labor, taxes the 
child, and should be economized with caution. 
The child has limits of resources for psychic 
work, just as it has limits for expenditures of 
physical strength. 

RESULTS INTANGIBLE. 

Indeed, the result of the lesson is in- 
tangible and unamenable to classification 
and grading, and so is the result of instruction 
throughout the religious school. Neither reci- 
tations nor examinations will exhibit what 
benefits or injuries the pupils have received. 
We forego the routine of school discipline in 
the Kindergarten class not because the chil- 
dren are too delicate to endure the stress, as an 
indulgence on our part with the weakness and 
the naivete of the little people, but because, in 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 21 

their case, we see very clearly the futility and 
the irrelevance of the common drill and dis- 
cipline. Discipline in the Kindergarten is coex- 
tensive with interest, as it ought to be in all 
classes of the school. 

TKE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE KINDERGARTEN 
TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILD-RpLIGION. 

So we may say that the Kindergarten child 
is not yet ready for religion in the real 
sense. That, of course, does not imply that 
the Kindergarten method may not guide the 
developing child into that condition in which 
relation, moral and religious, are recognized. 
In fact, this may give to the Kindergarten a 
distinct place in religious education. It may 
make a very important contribution to the un- 
folding of the religious nature, one much to 
be desired under the sordid spirit of modern 
life. The Jewish child must acquire spiritual 
acumen and interest and its religious feelings 
may awaken under the finer touch of parent 
and teacher. 

THE EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL IN THE 
RELIGIOUS KINDERGARTEN. 

This point of view of Rehgious Kinder- 
garten Class teaching fixes the kind of educa- 



22 AIMS OF TEACHING 

tional material necessary for it. It must not be 
biblical history, for that would anticipate the 
later work. It should not be abstract, for that 
is always dangerously near the abstruse. Nor 
does the other tool for teaching, hand work, 
comport with the idealizing aim and may 
contradict it. The only real Kindergarten 
material would be Jewish child-lore, child- 
folk-lore and child-legends. We are confessed- 
ly poor in these and it is a mere makeshift to 
substitute for them out of other child literature 
and child life. Perhaps somebody w^ill supply 
this need some day. There is rich material 
lying unused, I might almost say undiscovered, 
in the customs, popular stories and traditional 
practices of the Jews which, like the Teutonic 
Myths, are waiting for some Jewish Grimms to 
collect and rescue from contempt and oblivion. 

CARE IN THE USE OF MYTHS. 

In the meantime, selection and compilation 
of alien tales and adaptation of them to Jewish 
uses must serve the purpose. The standard of 
choice, of course, must be Jewish. Myths, 
chosen at random, may become insidious 
and may insinuate into the Jewish child an 
alien child-philosophy and child-morality 
whose standards of right and wrong and ap- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 23 

praisals of God and man may confuse the 
Jewish conception of Ufe. The Jewish stand- 
ard cannot be easily defined, but is felt clearly 
enough by the really Jewish teacher and 
parent. 

JEWISH LEGENDS. 

The educational point is to call out admira- 
tion and to feed the hunger of wonder. It is not 
recommended to moralize in this class. But 
it is good to awaken the children's awe, which 
is, at this stage of the soul life, in the main, a 
naive admiration. By tales and legends I do 
not mean the familiar Talmudic stories, for 
they deal largely with academic life and contain 
a morality of an advanced type, but I mean 
those popular tales which were told in Jewish 
homes in the later centuries. These, it may be, 
are adaptations of the tales current in European 
countries, but, when closely examined, they 
reveal modifications superinduced by the 
Jewish spirit of life. The standard of selec- 
tion, of course, must be what contribution 
these stories, legends and tales make to- 
ward the cultivation of child fancy. The ex- 
periences which they portray are subtle to 
the child, making God and man and the world 
entrancingly wonderful. Love is chaste, do- 
mestic life is clean, and God is in the center 
of all. 



24 AIMS OF TEACHING 

HEBREW. 

The teaching of Hebrew is entirely out of 
place in the Kindergarten class. The children 
of this age are busy enough to acquire con- 
trol of the vernacular. For it must be remem- 
bered that language is not merely practice of 
words, but exercise of the mind that recognizes, 
classifies and appraises beings and things 
and experiences. Every time a child acquires a 
word, it has really accomplished an intellectual 
and moral feat. To constrain the child to do 
a similar labor in the case of Hebrew, involves 
one of two things : either that it must duplicate 
this intellectual and moral work (that is, do it 
twice, when once is hard enough and sufficient 
for its soul growth), or it means confusion to 
the child-mind, which ought not to be embar- 
rassed by two (possibly contradictory) ways 
of thinking and feelings represented by two 
such unallied languages as Hebrew and Eng- 
lish. The subjects in a Jewish school, the 
oriental characters, the geographic lay of the 
scenes and the Eastern tone of life are in them- 
selves alien enough for an American child to 
call for special effort, and it is, therefore, ad- 
visable to postpone the strictly Palestinian 
color to a later school period, when the child's 
intellectual horizon is wider. It is not an 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 25 

answer to this to say that the Kindergarten 
child sees only the spectacular and romantic 
coloring in this foreign aspect of the stories, 
for as a matter of fact it does not. The child 
at this age wants to know its world, that world 
which it sees and touches and not any other. 
It wants to know whether this world in which 
it sees so many marvels is "true." Any other 
world that contradicts it, no matter how beau- 
tiful it is to adults, is untrue to the child. 

At any rate, words the child does not 
hear elsewhere and cannot use otherwise, must 
become mere dead weight. There will be better 
opportunities later on for acquiring a knowl- 
edge of Hebrew, when the pupil will be freer 
and more discriminating and will value speech 
for its own sake. 

CHILD-PRAYERS. 

Even the recital of the Hebrew phrases of the 
prayer book had better not be demanded of 
these children. For senseless and spiritless re- 
citals feed the soul with cant, and the childish 
soul should be protected against cant at the 
very start of its religious development. This 
caution applies with equal force to the kind 
of child prattle which passes under the name 
of child devotion and child prayers. Many of 



26 AIMS OF TEACHING 

them pave the way for conventionalisms, 
empty formalisms and hypocrisies that are the 
death of religion and the handicap of morality. 

NATURAL RELIGI0U5^NESS. 

One final word. The Kindergarten in the 
Jewish school marks only one step in the edu- 
cational plan of child culture. It is not 
meant as an attempt to "Judaize" the child. 
Later grades in the school are reserved for that. 
To introduce religious influence into the child- 
life of the Kindergarten period is a first step ; to 
make for the specific kind of Jewish religious- 
ness is a second. But this second step must be 
made only after child nature has had its oppor- 
tunity to unfold. We must first open up the 
royal road of human nature to the little soul 
and have confidence that it will go in the right 
direction. A good Jew is he who knows, 
feels and works out the moral and religious 
tradition of his people, and does so on the 
basis of the sound human nature he shares 
with all men. This natural religiousness the 
teacher must set free in the child before the 
days come when life is viewed from a definite 
angle. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 27 

THE SENSE OF KINSHIP. 

The fine normalities of the Kindergarten 
child are good material with which to build 
up its religious life. They make it immune 
against later prejudices and sectarianisms 
with which the world is so much impregnated. 
The Kindergarten teacher can establish open- 
hearted religiousness by encouraging instincts 
which make for kinship and by repressing those 
that divide. She should do this in the interest, 
not of an ideal and vague universalism, but 
rather of Judaism which inculcates practicable 
equity. This sense of kinship will help to keep 
its sympathies spontaneous. Judaism is rip- 
ened human nature. The Jewish child should 
enter into moral relations as soon as possible. 
Cultivate in the child, accordingly, the instincts 
which make for affiliations. Later life will 
check and coarsen them, you may be sure, but 
kinship is the child's only reality, and the seed 
out of which the best of adult life flowers. 

MUSIC. 

As for music, I should urge great caution in 
its choice. The historian may insist that there 
is no original Jewish music. But we may trust 
our ear to tell us what expresses the Jewish 
feeling. The customary Christian hymns do 



28 AIMS OF TEACHING 

not. A collection of Jewish child music is 
still a desideratum and not impossible. 
Some compilations have already been made, 
though not with the avowed aim to serve the 
schools. Kindergarten music is a kind of 
music different from every other kind. Jewish 
folk music comes very near to it and v/e 
should revive it for other than merely antiqua- 
rian interest. The religious school would be the 
first beneficiary by this restoration. 

The songs of the Kindergarten are not al- 
together mere pastime, least of all those songs 
which are part of the lesson. (To be sure, 
other songs than those that have a function in 
the working out of the lesson should not be 
sung.) What the song means and what it 
makes the pupil do or feel, give it a place in 
the lesson. 

PLAY. 

Play in the Kindergarten should be some- 
thing other than child sport. Play has a 
pedagogic significance in the Kindergarten, 
distinct from every other kind. It is inter- 
woven with the "work" of the lesson. It is 
systematized activity which enables the chil- 
dren to appropriate the content of the lesson. 
Every teacher should devise occasions for play 
expression by the children. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 29 

THIRD GRADE. 

DESCRIPTION OF THE CHILD-LIFE IN 
THIS GRADE. 

The type of child-life represented in this 
class is characterized thus: 

The children feel dependent. 

The compass of their experiences is the home 
and the family. 

Child-virtues and child-vices have their 
explanation in the conscious and unconscious 
influence that come from parents, kindred 
and such as constitute the household. The 
vices are not infrequently traceable to the 
whimsical treatment children receive there. 
When the standard of right and wrong is con- 
fused, the child's adjustment will be equally 
confused and shifting. 

The children receive and cannot yet give. 
They are not aware of mutual obligations, and 
they do not act from motives of reciprocity. 

Their fears arise through physical weakness 
and from the inability to account for the ex- 
periences they have. 

The children love and do not know why 
they love. Their likes and dislikes are instinc- 
tive and impulsive. 

Some of their affections are real and some 



30 AIMS OF TEACHING 

are superficial. Their selfishness, which is not 
immoral but natural, is due to their limitation 
and to their inability to realize what others 
feel. This selfishness sometimes assumes a 
subtle form. 

They do not yet control their impulses ; their 
will is, therefore, often mere whim. 

Their obstinacy, accordingly, is often merely 
misdirected will-power. On the other hand, it 
may arise from the stress which the undis- 
ciplined instincts exert. 

Their senses are untrained, and what they 
desire are the suggestions of fleeting impres- 
sions. Their fancies and imaginations are in- 
coherent. What they see, they do not see with 
"their mind's eye." Fairy tales and legends, 
therefore, must be used with care, if they are 
not to confuse their moral judgment. 

The children are given to boastfulness. This 
is posing, calculated to attract notice; the 
child seems to become conscious of the fact 
that it is attaining to a moral value of its 
own. Again, boastfulness may be less naive, 
less indicative of moral progress, and merely 
an exaggerated appraisal of self. This must be 
corrected, for without a right moral measure 
of itself the child will eventually, as an adult, 
come into conflict with the world. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 31 

THE TASK OF THE TEACHER. 

One of the problems of the teacher is to 
enlighten the self-consciousness of the child 
and to equip it with the checks of discernment 
and discretion. And this should be done at the 
time while the moral life is still pliable and the 
training influence is personal and direct. 

The dominant purpose of the teacher is to 
set the child-life into a definite place within the 
family. The child is to feel that it exists for the 
home, instead of, as heretofore, the home exist- 
ing for it. 

The teacher must supply reasons for such 
domestic loyalty. But the reasons should be 
the child's reasons, not the teacher's reason- 
ing. It is not wise to tell the children why 
they act and feel in certain ways. Analysis 
weakens the moral feelings. The teacher should 
endeavor to preserve the freshness and ori- 
ginality of child-sentiment. Much of moral- 
ization, which some teachers impose upon 
their pupils, denaturalizes them, and a sym- 
pathetic teacher, who has respect for original 
child-nature, will be on his guard to pre- 
serve it. 



32 AIMS OF TEACHING 

THE FAMILY. 

The child's world is the family and the 
child's morality is domestic. 

But no home can be altogether isolated; 
strangers, even if only servants or friends, cross 
its threshold and enter it. On the other hand, 
family interests cannot be so delimited as to 
cut off the home from relation with outsiders. 
The home, in fact, is the meeting place of 
strangers as well as kindred. Both of these 
have a necessary share in the expanding life of 
the child. The teacher must regard the home 
not as any exclusive place, but as a place into 
which the influences of the active world pour 
abundantly. The fact that many outsiders 
touch the child's life already in the home, 
should be used by the teacher for the widen- 
ing of the intellectual and moral horizon of the 
pupil. The child's relations with the servant, 
for instance, are occasions for moral adjust- 
ment. ' 

THE HOME. 

The home is a moral organization : there are 
grades of relations in it, of subordination 
to the parent, of co-ordination with brother 
and sister, of super-ordination toward ser- 
vants. And the adjustment which widens out 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 33 

from the last to that towards strangers offers 
problems which require varied experience and 
prolonged guidance. Many of the difficulties 
of adult life, not only as to tact and courtesy, 
but also as to the equities and social justice, 
are foreshadowed at this period of childhood. 
A combination of domestic loyalty with an ap- 
preciation of the fact that the home is depend- 
ent upon the outside world and maintains itself 
only when it, in turn, is sympathetic with ex- 
tra-domestic life, is the very basis of a well- 
balanced morality. In these several kinds of 
moral relations — predominantly of submissive- 
ness to the parents who are types to be imitated, 
of coordination with brotherhood and sister- 
hood which trains for mutuality, of super- 
ordination toward servants which releases the 
natural craving to be superior to somebody, and 
finally in the adjustment toward the more 
distant relative or the errand boy or the pedd- 
ler or the dinner-guest or even the tutor, when 
the moral sense spreads out into a larger cir- 
cle, the dependence is transmuted into inter- 
dependence between home and world, and be- 
tween child and adults. This proceeds on the 
line of the natural unfolding of the child- 
moralities. Obedience at this age means con- 
forming to the prevailing domestic type of liv- 



34 AIMS OF TEACHING 

ing. It is emulation of good example, rather 
than subordination to authority. 

Will-power is possible only in the degree in 
which there is heartiness in sharing the home- 
life. Respect, which is, as it were, the first 
degree of obedience, comes from admiration. 

THE PERCEPTION OF GOD AND CHILD- 
DEVELOPMENT. 

The child's religiousness is, of course, in 
keeping with the child's morality. The roots of 
it lie in the feeling of dependence. It is a ped- 
agogic error to teach "God" summarily with- 
out clear suggestion of what God means for 
the child. The point to be made is not 
that God exists, but that God meets a child- 
need, a child-interest. The fact is that the child 
passes through various stages with regard to 
the God-feeling and the God-idea, each God- 
thought and God-sentiment varying with each 
stage of developing child-nature. Each stage 
of the child religiousness is in keeping with the 
intellectual and the moral stage to which the 
child attains. At the age with which we deal 
now, the child feels it is dependent upon the 
elemental facts of kinship, nature and direct 
experience. 

The caprices of the natural phenomena, 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 35 

because not understood, and the child's rela- 
tion to people similarly not understood, super- 
induce in the child a distinct child-philosophy 
and a child-theology. God is the One to whom 
the child is subordinate as all other people are. 
God is He about whom the circle of the de- 
pendents is largest. 

MORAL RELATIONS IN THE HOME-LIFE. 

The aim of the teacher should be to interpret 
this physical sense of dependence into a moral 
one; that is, to put the child into such situa- 
tions, by the lesson and the class-experience, 
as to help it realize that in the large world, just 
as in its little family, there are moral rela- 
tions toward people and moral adjustments to 
experiences. In the center of these is God, just 
as the father is the center of the home. God is 
for this child not yet Creator and Governor 
and such, for it has as yet neither a scientific 
interest in, nor a theory of things. He is 
simply the Father, the Spirit of the Home writ 
large, as it were. And the World is the home, 
within which move many people who give and 
get things and receive and respond to in- 
fluences. Merit and demerit are prototyped in 
the child-reward for domestic virtue and child- 



36 AIMS OF TEACHING 

penalties for domestic wrongs. God approves 
and disapproves, just as the father and mother 
do. The other relationships and the feelings 
which go with these mingle in this child-system 
of compensations. 

The moral instinct of the Jew is accentuated 
already in childhood. Of this the teacher should 
be conscious. He need not argue for morali- 
ty, nor bear upon Jewish child-nature with the 
pressure of the physical facts. Even at this 
period of child-life, God is not a "power," to 
which men must submit, but a moral person- 
ality, such as the father, the mother and the 
kindred are. The Jewish child begins its moral 
development higher up in the scale. It is 
the lift which the eventful centuries of the Jew- 
ish people have given to it. The child feels that 
it is dependent upon God, just as it is depend- 
ent upon all personalities with which it is in 
touch. Moral growth begins when the depend- 
ence ceases to be one-sided. The child's moral 
development requires expansion of interests. 

THE VIRTUES. 

The child must see duty toward parent, 
brother, sister, teacher, servant in varying 
degrees. Do not make an inventory of the bene- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 37 

fits which accrue to the child from home com- 
forts and home advantages, for such an inven- 
tory would set up a commercial standard. Vir- 
tue should not be taught, nor its praises sung, 
on the score of profitableness. Reasoning 
about virtues, at any rate, even in later periods 
of life, tends to weaken their hold on men. In- 
stinctive virtuousness is the truest source of 
strength. Orderliness, Tidiness, Cleanliness, 
Punctuality, Industriousness are desirable 
qualities because they maintain the child in its 
environment. The ground of the virtues now 
is helpfulness. 

OBEDIENCE. 

They imply fitting in with the order and or- 
ganization of the home, and a dawning sense of 
authority which later makes for respect for 
society and social obligations. In fact they 
get their meaning and their value through 
religious submissiveness. They enlarge by the 
widening of life out of merely domestic into 
adult interests in the world, when the religiouc 
motives begin to assert themselves. Some re- 
ligiousness lies, in fact, implicitly in these vir- 
tues from the start, as much of it as is 
consonant with child-faith. 



38 AIMS OF TEACHING 

TRUTHFULNESS. 

Truthfulness is a central virtue, on the 
ground of honesty not of word, but of deed. 
The child should be truthful in the home, 
because it has a part in the home life and false- 
ness and unreliability hinder co-operation. 
Truthfulness is usually interpreted as intel- 
lectual correctness, but at this period of child- 
hood truthfulness is a form of conduct. It is a 
virtue as to doing rather than as to thought 
and speech. 

All moral qualities should have a direct con- 
nection with the God-idea or God-feeling. For 
the God-thought is not merely a logical con- 
cept, but a driving force for moral conduct. 
This is especially true in the case of Jewish 
morality. God is truthful. We should be like 
Him, just as the father, the mother, and all of 
the family are. 

CHILD-FAULTS. 

The foibles during the epoch of childhood, 
boastfulness, for instance, envy, hypocrisy, im- 
patience, rudeness and the like, are virtues 
in disguise, or rather virtues in formation. 
Boastfulness may be trained into ambitious- 
ness ; envy into self-effort ; hypocrisy into fear 
combined with scrupulousness ; impatience, 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 39 

which is yielding to impulse, into strength by 
controlling it. 

The life of the home, when the relations be- 
come more diversified and more social, will ini- 
tiate the advance from this period into the next 
higher. These bring another kind of child- 
morality and child-theology. 

THE MATERIAL. 

The Story Material of this Grade is the 
account of three homes : 

The homes of Abraham, of Isaac and of 
Jacob. Upon closer examination, these prove 
to be progressive. Abraham is a nomad, Isaac 
a hunter (does he not hanker after venison 
even in his helpless old age.^) and Jacob, who 
in his youth had been a wage-earner, has estab- 
lished an elaborate household. Shepherd life 
and nature are significant to Abraham. Isaac 
passes from nomadism to settlement. Jacob 
is a patriarch. There are, accordingly, three 
distinct types of home-life, with the culture 
characteristic of each respectively. 

TYPES OF CHILD-LIFE. 

There are also several types of child-life, 
from Isaac the dutiful to Joseph the ambitious. 
The several virtues and vices, too, have their 



40 AIMS OF TEACHING 

respective compensations. The teacher should 
be on his guard not to show that Providence 
is just in every detail, for that is not in ac- 
cordance with usual experience. The child 
knows through his own escapades that the bad 
is often unpunished, and the good unrewarded. 
Abraham is dutiful, giving up home and kin- 
dred for the sake of an obligation. Isaac is 
obedient. Jacob is punctual (does he not do at 
once what his father asks him to do, while Esau 
comes late, too late!), industrious, helpful. 
Esau is the cause of the break-up of the home, 
of the feud between brothers, and of the grief of 
his parents. The family life of Jacob is typical, 
though not exemplary nor deserving of emula- 
tion. Not only the story of Joseph, but also 
the characterization of the sons in the Blessing 
of Jacob on his death-bed suggests virtue and 
vice. 

The teacher, in presenting to the pupils 
the moral problems of home life, should guard 
against two extremes: in the first place, he 
should not convey the impression that the 
Three Homes of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob 
are sublimely classical and therefore beyond 
practical emulation; and, in the second place, 
he must not make them commonplace, for that 
would destroy their educational value. The 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 41 

pedagogic value of a subject lies in its natural- 
ness, and the teacher should tactfully uphold 
it. These Three Homes are real homes, and 
describe the joys and the difficulties which 
every home has. They are pictures of real 
child-experiences, such as occur today and 
everywhere. 

The teacher's duty is not to exalt Judaism, 
as if it presented the ideally best, but to employ 
the traditions of human life, as they truthfully 
are. Fortunately the Bible stories are honestly 
and frankly true and therefore irresistible 
effective. 

GOD. 

God is not to be taught abstractly. That He 
has been taught as a philosophic "truth" has 
been the pedagogic sin all through the history 
of sectarian schools. The teacher should show 
that God is active everywhere and in every- 
thing. God is in every home, in every life and 
within every experience. Portray God not as 
"saying," but as doing. 



PROVIDENCE. 

This demands from the teacher a delicate 
sense as to what "Providence" is. In this Grade, 
Providence is what God does, or rather what 



42 AIMS OF TEACI-HNG 

men do while they are rehgious and moral. 
The salutary lesson should be brought to the 
child at this period that emulation is the first 
step toward religiousness. The child should feel 
himself in the world as if it were a very large 
home, where God is the supreme standard, as 
the father is in the small child-home. 

When a pupil enters later classes, he will get 
an enrichment of the God-feeling. But, in this 
Grade, God is taught as the Father of the 
World, and the child feels toward God as it 
feels toward its father. It is not a question of 
"love," for you cannot teach love ; love comes 
spontaneously. But it is a question of confi- 
dence and nearness. The child's dependence is 
affectionate and brings him close to God. De- 
pendence does not estrange; it binds and 
holds. In fact, this implicit trust is a neces- 
sary step in the development of the "belief 
in God. 

Abraham (notice the legend in the Midrash 
of his child-philosophy as to what God is), 
Isaac and his readiness to yield up his life, 
Jacob and his dream at Beth El, Joseph and 
how certain he is that what he sees in his 
dreams will come to pass, the loyalty of Abra- 
ham, the fidelity of Eliezer, the amiability of 
Rebekah, the sordidness of Lot, the ten- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 43 

derness of Rachel, the intolerance of Joseph's 
brothers, the manliness of Judah and the filial 
devotion of Joseph may be exhibited by the 
teacher as moral situations. The stories of 
the Bible are more than disjointed Short- 
stories. They constitute types of life, proto- 
types for emulation, instances ever the same at 
the best and at the worst of human life. 

LOYALTY. 

The Jewish Religious School must cultivate 
also a heightened sense of interdependence. 
The children should carry into their lives the 
sense of co-operation as adult Jews. The basal 
condition for that is that the children feel they 
are near and kindred to one another. The 
teacher's aim should be not so much to con- 
vince as to enlist, and not so much to enlist 
for reasons of personal and private benefit, as 
that the child feel an interest in other children. 
The sense of communion sets its face against 
selfishness and isolation. The bane of modern 
Judaism is the aloofness of each separate Jew, 
but the exquisite charm of the Jew of former 
ages lay in the solidarity which was ingrained 
in his nature. Mutuality was not a merely 
gracious tolerance, as it is now. The teacher 
should aim to lodge loyalty in the children, for 



44 AIMS OF TEACHING 

out of this child-loyalty grow the reliable adult 
loyalties. Jewish loyalty, loyalty to the com- 
mon cause, loyalty leshem Shomayim which 
is the germ of respect and reverence to man 
and God, is more than merely a concession. 
He has no real religious culture who considers 
his obligations with regard only to his own in- 
terests. Judaism is a social religion and the 
loyalties it inculcates make for affinity and 
permanent kinship. 

INDIVIDUALISM. 

The teacher opens up the child-souls to 
mutualities, for these will hold them together 
after their school years in adult work and adult 
relations. The Jewish teacher must be on 
his guard in this matter more than in any other. 
For the Jew already in childhood is much 
given to assert his personality. Individual- 
ism is a bid for recognition and an effort to 
maintain oneself against others ; and the Jew- 
ish people, trained by the desperate conditions 
it has had to contend with in all ages and in 
all places, has been forced to accentuate it. 
This may account for some of the difficulties 
in discipline in the Jewish Religious School. 
But this individualism of the Jewish child is 
not to be condemned altogether, for it is the 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 45 

psychic force which pushes forth many of the 
best and most efficient faculties. The ReUgious 
School should direct this Jewish individualism, 
that it become a source of intellectual and 
moral strength. Still, though the Jewish people 
needs men of self-assertion, it needs also men 
who appreciate community in feeling. 

THE COMMON TERM IN CHILDREN. 

Nowhere is it more necessary than in the 
Religious School to call attention to the ele- 
mentary principle of pedagogy that religious- 
ness and piety are grounded not on egoism, but 
on fellowship. Traditional church instruction 
made for "personal salvation" and insinuated 
a subtle selfishness, but child-religiousness, 
from which later phases of adult-religion de- 
velop, grows out of charmingly affable and 
frank child-nature. Children feel themselves 
near to one another at the first moment they 
meet. The teacher of religion should recognize 
and give scope to this democracy of child- 
nature. 

THE TYPE-CHILD. 

The teacher should have in mind a type- 
child, which represents the psychological facts. 
This the teacher, eliminating every personal 



46 AIMS OF TEACHING 

feature and trait, should seek in every one 
of his class. He must find it so that he may 
understand the children and the work they 
do. He must engage every child of his class. 
He cannot afford to ignore nor neglect to enlist 
one child. Aside from the fact that an unin- 
terested child is a storm center of discontent, 
the teacher who does not properly appraise the 
qualifications of his children starts and must 
necessarily end in confusion. Many of the 
difficulties a teacher encounters cease as soon as 
he begins to address his pupils from the point of 
view of their common child-nature. That 
teacher must fail who has no true view of 
child-nature, but regards his class as an agre- 
gation of children reciprocally exclusive of one 
another. The fact is that a class is a little com- 
munity, the members of which have common 
sympathies and like temperaments. They will 
work together only when they feel similar 
needs and share similar expectations. 

The teacher who has made the discovery of 
this typical child, as to age and physical and 
psychical condition, is very likely to be tolerant 
of individual traits in the different children. 
In a very positive sense he will not allow him- 
self to be disturbed by them. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 47 

ABSTRACT TEACHING AND CHARACTER. 

The difficulty in instruction in religious 
schools lies in the fact that it deals with 
abstractions, hard even for adults to grasp. 

The process of attaining to generalization 
requires methodic and sustained thinking. 
This it is unfair to expect of the child-mind. 
The child craves for action and learns by what 
it does and not by what it thinks. The child's 
mind as well as its character grows by doing 
things, and moral development comes only by 
actual adjustments to persons and conditions. 
In the Religious School, of course, moral and 
religious teaching will always be more or less 
abstract and academic. It is a regrettable 
limitation and a stumbling block in its way. 
This is apparent nowhere so much as in the 
period of this Third Grade, in which teachers 
attempt to busy the children by setting them 
to work pasting pictures, molding maps 
and the like, with the expectation that these 
occupations contribute somehow to sustaining 
interest. But activities that have no relation to 
training of character and no moral suggestion 
of their own are barren of educational effect. 



48 AIMS OF TEACHING 

CONCRETE WORK MUST HAVE RELATION TO 
THE AIM OF THE LESSON. 

Neat copy-books, molding relief maps, 
pictures and maps are helpful in the "les- 
son" primarily to hold the pupils to the task the 
teacher has set, and are merely mechanical 
contrivances for the purpose. The primary 
aim of teaching in the Religious School, how- 
ever, is to establish the religious Jewish 
sense. The lesson should call out the activity 
by its own moral content and the work the 
children do should be their spontaneous ex- 
pression, as it were, of what the lesson contains ; 
writing, pasting pictures and sand-heaps are 
merely "mock life" in the class. They are play 
and not work, for work aims at self-expression. 
What children do in the class should express 
what they think and what they feel with regard 
to the moral or religious truth brought home 
to them. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 49 

FOURTH GRADE. 

The pupil is acquiring a sense of self. The 
boy and girl are no longer mere dependents; 
their moral independence is now awakening. 
This period is the period of intellectual and 
moral absorption. The child learns much about 
the physical world, with which it comes into 
constant touch. It learns to control the things 
of life. But it must now begin to control 
itself. This is the time of wills and whims, 
which are, for the most part, mere impulses. 
The child is not yet capable of holding to a 
line of conduct, nor of persisting in it by 
strength of will. The child is self-centered and, 
accordingly, selfish. But this selfishness is not 
immoral; it is on the contrar}^ on the roaa 
toward moral maturity. The problem of the 
teacher is not to suppress this selfishness, but 
to use it for right ends; that is, to help the 
child to so use it that it will lead to moral 
interests. 

THE WHIMS OF THE CHILD. 

The whim of the child at this period is often 
uncontrolled wish and obstinacy. The often 
contradictory volitions and wills to which the 
child is subject present the problem how it may 



so AIMS OF TEACHING 

acquire capacity to adjust itself to other wills 
and to other personalities, and how it may find 
its bearings in the world in which wishes and 
wills conflict. Especially necessary is the 
child's adjustment to those who are morally its 
superiors and its inferiors. Here the most 
significant part of character is being molded. 

ADMIRATION. 

This is the age of admiration, of adjust- 
ment to desirable types of life. The means 
are the presentation of heroes whom it is 
worth while to imitate and emulate. The ad- 
miration should not be based on the profit that 
comes from the virtues, but from the fact that 
the real moral prototypes are lovable and ad- 
mirable in themselves. The teacher of Jewish 
children should be very observant of this. 
Unfortunately, Jewish adults are not prone to 
transports of enthusiasm in the presence of 
great men. Hero-worship under the control of 
sane judgment, is a natural expression of a 
healthy morality, and should not be deficient 
in Jewish children. Admiration is, as it were, 
a bridge between what we are and what we 
aspire to become. The child should find its 
lever for moral advancement in the large per- 
sonalities, which are a living proof of what 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 51 

men can achieve, and what children, too, may 
learn to do. The teacher must awaken in his 
pupils the passion for admiration, in which 
healthy childhood always delights. 

Still, though for this period of childhood 
heroism is spectacular, it is not mere pose. The 
child feels there is a difference between the 
genuine and the artificial, and the teacher 
must, therefore protect him against the 
spurious. The child will accept none other than 
a moral hero. The hero does things the child 
cannot, but would like to do. The hero is, as 
it were, the great wish of the child. And the 
story of the hero should be the moral hunger 
of the child writ large. The moral difficulties 
and the moral achievements of the hero in the 
story should reflect what is going on in the 
soul of the child. The child should recognize 
himself in it. Therefore, the religious and 
moral prototype should be not "ideal," but a 
man of flesh and blood. He may have the ad- 
ditional grace of fervor, which we sometimes 
call spirituality; but even that fervor should 
be natural. The religious hero should not be a 
philosopher, nor a martyr, nor an ascetic. Chil- 
dren at this age like an adventurer, the man 
who has been in the midst of the great, wide 
world, and likes to tell of it. In fact, the child 



52 AIMS OF TEACHING 

at this epoch is himself an adventurer who is 
taking his first peep into the world. 

The model for children should never be 
"perfect." Perfect men are not real men and 
it is wrong to impose upon children stories 
of the impossible. Goody-goody men and 
women are of no moral benefit. The biblical 
men and women were not perfect; they were 
"true" men and "true" women, and it is in 
truthfulness we wish the child to develop. As 
to biblical types of life, teachers should distin- 
guish between what is significant in theology 
and what in education. In the class room, 
Moses is an example of manhood, a notable 
instance of what a true man will and can do. 
The restlessness of the people, their vacillations 
and cowardice, also their valor and their 
faith, are moral experiences which the child 
will readily enough recognize as his own. 

BIOGRAPHY. 

The form of instruction in this class should 
be biographical. It should comprise graphic 
sketches how forceful personalities lived. But 
it should be neither dramatic, nor mere story- 
telling; it should reveal the hero's inner self. 
Each story should be a short-story complete in 
itself, the moral of which stands out clearly and 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 53 

distinctly. The error of teachers in Religious 
Schools is that they tell of men and women 
only in so far as they have a place within the 
history of Israel and the Jewish religion. 

According to the traditional method of Reli- 
gious Schools, the men and women of the Bible 
are little more than pawns upon the cosmic 
chessboard, showing how God did this and that 
by them. But this is a theological view. The 
aim of the Religious School, however, should be 
not to prove the principles of theology, but to 
cultivate the religious instincts of children, so 
that these may be active in their lives. 

It is clear enough how it has come. Jewish 
theology was suspicious of everything that 
might lead to the worship of a man. We have 
said before that Jews lack adequate admiration 
of great men; it was due to the fear that ad- 
miration might lead to the worship of the 
"Son of God." Judaism wants to be free 
from every suspicion of a belief in a deified 
man, and teaches God alone. This exclusive 
sublimation of the divine has checked the 
faculty for admiration. To lack enthusiasm 
is serious enough for men, but childhood can- 
not do without it. The Jewish children of to- 
day show the effects of this matter-of-fact at- 
titude, by which not only nothing great can be 



54 AIMS OF TEACHING 

done, but duties also are reduced to drudgery. 
The biographical study in this Grade may 
restore to Jewish childhood the love and the 
admiration of greatness. The religious teacher 
can thus revive in the modern Jews an import- 
ant heart-throb of the moral life. 

A biography is an exhibit of what religion 
and morals do in men's lives. The teacher must 
make the typical men and women live 
afresh in the children, and the children must be 
brought into a sense of kinship with them. 
They must recognize that the souls of the 
biblical men and women are like their own 
souls, only finer, clearer and stronger, that they 
are not distant, but very near to them, as near 
as truth is, that they represent that truth of life 
which the children themselves feel. 

The heroes of this period of childhood, how- 
ever, do not yet possess definite moral qualities. 
This period is largely one of general interest 
in big things and big men; it is not yet time 
for self-expression, nor for a craving to count 
as somebody distinct and independent. The 
child is submerged in the family and has no 
conscious individual value. Care must, there- 
fore, be observed not to anticipate a definite 
moral interest which as yet does not operate 
in the child. The child is growing in a merely 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 55 

general moral capacity; it is not yet attaining 
to a moral individuality of its own. 

The examples given by the teacher must 
have reference to conduct and not to belief. 
A child cannot go beyond facts and does not 
attempt to interpret them. Always and every- 
where religion and morals demand conduct. 
Religion can never be merely opinion; it can 
never stop short of action. 

The teacher's business, whether he teaches 
religion or ethics, is to establish right interests 
in the children and to see to it that these 
healthy interests pass into habits of living. The 
teacher of Judaism should be the last to mis- 
take mere opinion for conviction, and he would 
do wrong to Jewish children if he led them 
merely to believe in academic goodness, justice 
and loyalty. The pupils should leave his class 
so much under the spell of the lesson that they 
should aspire to be like the men and women of 
whom they had just heard. 

The final word of the teacher to his pupils 
should be: Go, and do likewise. 

THE MATERIAL. 

The historic material of the Fourth Grade 
comprises : 

The Life of Joseph, the Life of Moses, the 



56 AIMS OF TEACHING 

History of Israel in the Desert, concluding 
with the account of the Death of Moses. 

THE AIM. 

This period presents various types of heroic 
lives. It is rich in moral situations, and it is 
these which the teacher should use as educative 
material. His aim in this Fourth Grade is to 
develop the child's sense that it has a place in 
the family and among its associates, and that 
it must maintain that place by personal 
efficiency. 

The old-fashioned teacher took delight in 
the presentation of the story of Joseph as the 
story of an ideal boy. If so, the story cannot 
be one of real boy-life at the same time. It 
will not do to show that Joseph was a common 
tattler, and at the same time one who fas- 
cinated everybody. Nor is it right to stig- 
matize his ambition as a vice and then again 
speak of him as one whom "God has sent." 

Every healthy boy has fancies of the "big 
things" he would like to do. The teacher 
touches the springs of the holiest in a boy's 
soul when he tells the story of the dreaming 
Joseph. That Joseph should become King over 
all Egypt is something every boy under- 
stands quite naturally. He wants to become 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 57 

himself a King or something Uke that, some 
day. Joseph's generosity to his brothers, 
his eagerness to "be quits" with them, and 
to forgive them and all that, is in keeping with 
a boy's frank nature. Mention such things and 
he feels as if they came from his own heart. 
Some teachers moralize too much, and seem to 
deal with the pupil as if he were unregenerate or 
defective. We may safely trust boy-nature 
and it is often better to take a moral instinct 
in the boy for granted than preach it into him. 
When one sees a painting or a statue, the 
artist need not stand by to explain. On the 
contrary, the need of explanation is an evidence 
of failure. Character is no less a thing of 
beauty and truth, and the least tutored of us 
should be able to appreciate it. A teacher is an 
artist, and he should set up the character of his 
subject before his pupils and trust their in- 
stincts to feel its moral appeal. This appeal 
comes not through the charm of the graphic 
description, though that is not to be despised, 
but from the natural truth of the hero. 

THE "moral" of a LESSON. 

An appended moral is entirely unneces- 
sary. There are only two valid reasons for a 
moral at the end of a lesson: to help the 



58 AIMS OF TEACHING 

memory and to give the child an abstract rule 
of life, so that he may apply it in similar situa- 
tions. But let the child look deep into the soul 
of the hero and his child-nature will do the 
generalizing himself. To be sure, this makes a 
great demand upon the teacher, but the teacher 
of religiousness assumes a grave responsibility 
and must be equal to it. Nothing else will do 
in a religious school than transmission from 
teacher's soul to child's soul, and the teacher 
must himself feel the moral enthusiasm if 
it is to thrill in the children. The child cannot 
attain to personality, unless the teacher give 
it his own. This a teacher who is serious can 
do: he can make every biblical character and 
every character he cites in the class-room live 
before the children in concrete truthfulness. 

This demand applies to all the historical 
material of this Grade, as, in fact, it applies to 
all educational effort. Moses, the other hero 
for this Grade, is not a legislator, he is not an 
inspired prophet, he is not even the emanci- 
pator of a people, he is simply a man who uses 
rightly the opportunities that have come to 
him, and does not lapse to the level of slaves 
or shepherds or common people. He is gal- 
lant to the girls at the well and just to a 
King. For this class, the Exodus is not an act 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 59 

of God, but the achievement of a man who has 
justice on his side. There is plenty of time in 
later Grades to give the theological or the 
political interpretation. The children of this 
Grade are not capable of appreciating the 
historic significance of the Exodus, and, since 
our duty is to help in moral and religious 
growth, theological and political considera- 
tions are irrelevant. 

At the beginning of the cycle of the Moses 
stories, we have a domestic tragedy, motherly 
anxiety and sisterly loyalty. It is good to 
bring these to the children at this period when 
they recognize that each member of their 
household has a certain and responsible place 
in it, to help them realize that homes have 
hazards, and that each one, not only father and 
mother, but also brother or sister, has a re- 
sponsibility and should contribute to the 
domestic welfare. The moral problem of the 
work of this Grade is, indeed, to accentuate the 
personal standing of each member in the home. 
Children have nothing to do with the profound 
affairs of Providence and the divine choice of 
a people. Their future is conditioned by 
their moral discernment. The stories of the 
Bible, whatever their import from the point of 
view of theology, are, for the purposes of teach- 



60 AIMS OF TEACHING 

ing, nothing else than means for training. They 
are, as it were, typical experiences, and it is the 
task of the teacher to make these stories appear 
as altogether personal and real. 

THE "laws." 

Despite the fact that an account of the 
Mosaic Legislation is interspersed in the 
biblical text of these stories, it should not inter- 
rupt the lessons. Selections may be made of 
such parts of it as refer to the moral problems 
of this child-age, such, for instance, as laws 
that refer to home and home-life, honor and 
obedience to parents, relation between masters 
and slaves, treatment of aliens, rights of prop- 
erty, humaneness toward animals, philan- 
thropy, the qualifications for the priesthood, 
dietary laws and the like. But these selections 
should be incidental to the development of the 
Mosaic Story, and implicit in the biographies, 
and should not be taught abstractly. Chil- 
dren are not students of law ; they cannot learn 
how to conform to lawful living through 
formulas. Even the Ten Commandments 
must be brought home to them (at least, such 
as are within their scope) in the form of situa- 
tions of concrete life. That they are "uni- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 61 

versal" laws adds nothing to their significance, 
so far as children feel. Laws check children 
in their impulses, or enlarge the reach of their 
moral personality for good or for ill. The ful- 
fillment or the violation of law is helpful or 
disturbs the home. That is all children need 
to get out of the lessons and that is very much ! 
There is opportunity for discipline as to law all 
through the Mosaic Story, to show that the 
seeds of the Great Legislation lie in what 
Moses himself felt, aspired to and did in his 
eventful life. Again the doctrine that these 
"words" were revealed need not disturb the 
teacher, for his function is not to give informa- 
tion on theological origins, but to establish 
habits of conduct and to help the child to make 
his first step toward character. It is strange 
that a teacher should believe he has trained 
a child adequately and may dismiss it into life 
when it can do nothing more than recite unctu- 
ous words and phrases. The Ten Command- 
ments should be a moral influence, should 
take a place in the conscience of the child and 
constitute the controlling authority of the 
child-personality. Nothing is more servicable 
for this than the simple and forceful words of 
The Law, but they must come to the child 
not as abstractions, but as concrete facts of 



62 AIMS OF TEACHING 

human nature and of its child-nature at its 
worst and at its best. 

MORAL INDEPENDENCE. 

The work of this Fourth Grade is on the 
Hne of progression from that of the last 
Grade. That had for its central truth the 
dependence of the child. But this Grade leads 
in the child's first effort toward moral inde- 
pendence. This is not yet freedom, nor even 
a release from paternal restrictions. It means 
that the child feels he is not any longer mere- 
ly a receiver of benefits, but that he, too, can 
do some things, that he can give something out 
of his life on his own responsibility. The 
virtues and the vices of this period are, there- 
fore, quite new. It is a time for the inculca- 
tion of heroism, ambitiousness, self-control, 
perseverance (including patience), courtesy 
(that is, good manners), kindness (because of 
sympathetic understanding of equals), regard 
for persons (from the point of view of justness, 
not of reciprocal justice), regard for the pro- 
perty of others, helpfulness (voluntary not 
mutual service). These duties to others are 
not social duties for this type of childhood. 
They are an expression of the self. They have 
their origin and their end in the personality. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 63 

The brother, the sister and the kindred or even 
the acquaintance of the child is not to be 
obHgated by the service ; it is the child himself 
who expresses himself in generous activities. 
The motive in all these child-virtues lies in the 
rising sense of responsibility to one's self. The 
complemental side of this personal morality, 
which aims at right results, will be supplied 
later. At this period, the child has too nar- 
row a view of life to apprehend social morali- 
ties. It is still busy with itself. It has not 
yet crossed the threshold of the home. As soon 
as it has acquired a certain aloofness from the 
home, and has entered into relations and in- 
terdependences with outside life, there will be 
time for social ethics. For the present they 
do not exist for the child. 

In the Third Grade we dealt with depend- 
ence ; in the Fourth Grade with independence. 
In the Fifth Grade we shall deal with duty. 



64 AIMS OF TEACHING 

FIFTH GRADE. 

* ' ' ft 

The child, is acquiring a sense of respon- 
sibiHty and obhgation. Beginning with duties 
in varying degrees toward those who constitute 
the home, and enlarging the domestic circle 
to include kindred, in gradations of moral in- 
terest and value, the feeling broadens to em- 
brace non-relatives and strangers. The child 
has passed out of dependence into moral self- 
hood and has become aware of the fact that 
he has definite relationship to other individ- 
uals. He is able to do some things which 
others recognize, and the members of the 
household look to him or value him because 
of them. . His sphere of activity is still 
domestic, and the reciprocal relations he has 
are not of his own selection (younger or older 
brother, or sister, helping father or mother, go- 
ing on errands, doing chores). 

But the child's life is growing beyond the 
domestic circle and his relations are differen- 
tiating. He recognizes, for instance, that the 
presence of the servant in the household is by 
contract and for pay, and that strangers come 
into touch with the home from motives of their 
own (the grocer, the baker, and also the 
teacher). These extra-home relations imply 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 65 

various degrees of obligation. Contact with 
some is for a time only, and with some it is 
permanent ; with some the relation is direct and 
face-to-face, with others it is more remote and 
occasional. A scale of values appears in ac- 
cordance with the contribution the persons 
make to the home. These graded values are of 
course not permanent. The teacher must clear 
up these moral appraisals and prevent their 
shifting. 

This is the period when impulses must 
yield to control, for a right sense of responsibil- 
ity can go only with deliberation. The child 
must make this first step in moral progression 
by acquiring strength of will. He must discrim- 
inate between what is right and what is wrong, 
and the first problem of will consists in choos- 
ing between them. Will does not stop at merely 
seeing what is right, but goes on to decide to 
do it. 

The steps of the child's progress so far are: 

From dependence to a personal position in 
the household. 

From the home-world to appreciation of en- 
vironment. 

From conforming to the rules of the home 
instinctively, to realizing that there are obliga- 
tions and moral requirements. 



66 AIMS OF TEACHING 

LAW. 

The child learns that law is sovereign, but 
also that conformity to law may not be merely 
formal but must be sincere. Here the teacher 
lays the foundation for honesty. 

The line of moral growth is from freedom to 
law, to the realization that if we want to "keep 
things" we must have strangers as well as our 
family on our side. 

There is only one kind of honesty. It is the 
naive telling or living up to the truth without 
being aware that there is anything other than 
the truth. It is the ingenuous attitude which 
is aware of neither the difficulty nor the merit 
of honesty. This untrained instinct is checked 
by propriety. Some facts we may tell and some 
we must suppress ; some facts we may not tell, 
and some we tell with euphemy at the proper 
time, or in secret. The fact may not be "nice" 
or "proper." We hesitate to tell the truth, or 
check ourselves in telling all of it, not because 
the fact is not really true, nor because we 
mean to use it wrongly, but because the person 
who hears it or the person who tells it may be 
injured or hurt. This motive in the child 
must not be despised. It is, in fact, the 
first tribute the child pays to society, and from 
this tact he will advance to considerateness, 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 67 

which is the very heart of justice. When 
the child's mental horizon becomes extended 
and he regards the rights of others, he will hold 
truth precious not merely as a private interest, 
nor as a mere convention, but as sacred in 
itself. At this period of life, however, child- 
truthfulness and child-honesty are impulses, 
and it is better to guide than to restrict them. 
The children should be led on lines of courtesy 
into sympathetic consideration of others. A 
falsehood "hurts" people, and the imagination 
of the child should be aroused as to that hurt. 
The child becomes veracious from the point of 
view of conscientiousness or exactness later, 
when he can make moral distinctions and has 
acquired intellectual clearness. 

TRUTH AND JUSTICE. 

It should be noted that truth-telling and do- 
ing justice are distinct virtues, but they 
have a common term in what at a later stage 
of morality is called the conscience. In child- 
psychology and child-morality the two should 
not to be kept distinct from one another. 

For adults, the one has reference to speech 
and the other to deed. But for the child, there 
is as yet no divorce between what he says 
and what he does, and doing is the immediate 



68 AIMS OF TEACHING 

expression of every mental and moral sug- 
gestion. Truthfulness is not merely a formal 
aspect of speech, nor justice a formal quality 
of conduct, as if the one had nothing to do 
with the other. They are one and the same 
virtue. The child deems both alike instances 
of truth, and does not rate one higher or lower 
than the other. Sound morality is, as in many 
other aspects, also in this on the side of the 
child. 

THE RIGHTS OF PROPERTY. 

Now those feelings begin which in the 
developed form we call the civic. They have 
their root in loyalty, which is first applied to 
home and kindred. This loyalty grows with 
the scope of the child's life, till the circle 
reaches those alliances which parents, teachers 
and other morally important people sug- 
gest. This is also the period when the sense 
of property begins to assert itself. For along 
with the perspective which rearranges the 
moral estimates of the people of the house- 
hold, goes a corresponding scale of rights and 
claims upon the child and, conversely, of the 
child upon them. The right of possession goes 
along with his rising sense of aloofness from the 
home community and with the growing capa- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 69 

city to create and to hold certain exclusive ad- 
vantages. The desire to hold things for per- 
sonal benefit accompanies the power to reach 
out, to defend, to devise, to earn; all of these 
are on the way toward a moral personality. 

It is not material to the child at this period 
that his right to hold the property has ^public 
recognition. That is the economic attitude at 
adult age. For the present, it is sufficient 
for the child that what he claims he can 
and does hold. The sanction for the posses- 
sion is altogether individual. This is before 
the age of law and lawfulness. Nor does the 
child at this time regard himself bound to a 
right use of things. He holds them and can 
do with them what he likes, on the ground that, 
since he is their creator and owner, he is also 
their master. Here freedom has its first diffi- 
culty. The problem for the teacher is to show 
that restriction does not reduce freedom, but 
directs it. 

Property is not secure nor permanent so 
long as my title to it consists only in holding 
it. For I must eventually measure my strength 
in holding it with the strength others have in 
wishing and seizing it, so that I must have a 
better, a more moral proof for my title of 
possession. The more moral claim consists in 



70 AIMS OF TEACHING 

my realizing what the thing means for me and 
what it means for others. Is it necessary for 
what I ought to do ? Then I must have it. If I 
do not need it for the performance of my duty, 
then I should not have it. And again, I have 
a right of possession in a thing only when 
others cannot deny my need of it. If I desire 
to own a thing, I must necessarily face public 
judgment and invite public approval. 

Finally, the thing I desire was made by 
others, and even the thing I made is not alto- 
gether my creation. In some way, invariably, 
it is the result of co-operation with others. I 
find in everything some other person's contri- 
bution, somebody else's interest, somebody 
else's right. And I must respect these. 

FRIENDSHIPS. 

The next step in moral progress is from 
sympathy by way of imagination to sympathy 
by way of co-operation. The child forms extra- 
domestic attachments. He enters upon friend- 
ships and new loyalties. Having no ulterior 
use for them, these friendships shift with 
the child's impulses. They offer oppor- 
tunities for adjustment to various child 
or adult characters and, therefore, are a 
disciplining experience. They enlighten the 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 71 

child as to what other people feel, want and 
ought to get. This subtle exploration of other 
people's souls and adjustment to them is of 
prime importance in moral development. To 
be sure, the friendship at this period is not 
ideal nor platonic, for that is possible only 
when the child is capable of fixing upon a stan- 
dard of choice. He cannot, as yet, be exclusive 
in his companionship, nor sustain it. Child- 
friendships are transitory and their significance 
lies in the service they severally render to the 
child's growth in social adaptability. They are 
fostered between boys and girls in complete 
frankness, a fact explicable on the ground that 
sexuality is subconscious. It is to be re- 
gretted that some adults disconcert these 
naive friendships by foolish prudery or sense- 
less innuendo. If unembarrassed, children at 
this period cultivate and maintain companion- 
ships and real brotherhoods and sisterhoods 
outside of the home. In fact, this is a discipline 
for later moralities between the sexes, which 
lodge in the child-soul the better because they 
are free from grosser motives. 

GOD IN THE CHILD-LIFE. 

The religious notions which arise at this 
epoch group about a "personal" God. That is, 



11 AIMS OF TEACHING 

God is not an abstraction and He is not 
aloof. He is real and "true" and the child 
deals with Him in every experience. Till now, 
the child's God-experiences came from the out- 
side. Now they emerge from the inner life, from 
those moral and mental illuminations which 
the soul sets aglow. The child projects his 
personality upon the world-canvas, as it were. 
He writes himself large, and the child's God is 
his own moving soul-life expanded and magni- 
fied. Hence, nothing so satisfies the child at 
this period as the stor^^ of a God who steps 
between men and does things, avenges wrongs 
or arranges the affairs of men. A knight who 
fights the fights of God and a prophet who re- 
bukes men are after his moral taste. In the 
development of religiousness, this is an im- 
portant phase. The child demands moral 
activity from his God, he wants a God who is 
not aloof, but shares the life of men. A God 
who fights on the battlefields in the midst of 
the legions fires the blood and stirs the heart. 
Here the Jewish teacher has a double duty. 
He should see to it that the Jewish child secure 
the religious and moral good that comes from 
hero-worship. The Jewish child-soul must get 
the flavor of fancy. He has been taught an 
academic doctrine about the "Unity of God," 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 73 

but has not been helped to apply "truth" to life. 
A normal child wants for his guide and com- 
panion a person and not an abstraction. He 
wants the God, and not a God. Judaism suffers 
today from the metaphysical method it pursues 
in the demonstration as to existence of God. 
The God of the Jewish catechism is an unin- 
teresting God and does not appeal to the feel- 
ings. He is not brought close to the heart of 
the child, so that he may "love Him with all 
his heart and soul and might." God is a 
"truth," but not the truth. He has no warmth 
and does not elicit warmth of feeling. For the 
Jewish child theological methaphysics are bar- 
ren wastes. That God is, is an obvious truth, 
and we do not need to drag the child through 
the catechism to see it. Nor is it necessary 
to be profound on the subject -of the Unity 
of God. God should cease to be a formula and 
begin to be an influence in child-life. A 
doctrine should be a moral influence and not 
an academic theorem. Its power to impress 
life arises not from the fact that it is 
true, but from the fact that it is moral. When 
we say that we believe in God, we mean that 
we know that we must deal with God every- 
where, and that it is good for us to be in sym- 
pathetic touch with Him. And when we say that 



74 AIMS OF TEACHING 

God is one, we mean that the world is all of 
one thought, one purpose and one moral con- 
tent, that we come across the same true and 
just and kind God, wherever we go and what- 
ever we do, that we are face to face with God 
at every point of our lives and that God is face 
to face with us. This, made graphic, real and 
personal, is religion, and should be taught. But 
this is the very thing we have witheld from the 
Jewish child. Our historic fear of idolatry has 
made us suspicious of child-fancy. Religious- 
ness cannot thrive without intimacy with God. 
We must connect the child's love of the hero 
with the child's awe of divine personality, so 
that admiration may be sublimated into wor- 
ship. 

NATURE AND THE JEW^ISH CHILD. 

The Jewish child must also learn to love na- 
ture, the hills and valleys, the rivers, the ocean, 
and feel that they, too, are a part of God and of 
His life. If the Jew is to get out of the Ghetto 
indeed, his religion must be turned toward the 
freedom and the openness of nature. His child 
must learn to lift his eyes to mountain and sky 
and to sweep them freely over the fields. We 
do not help the Jewish child unless we give him 
something other than metaphysics for the real- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 75 

ities of life. Enthusiasm for nature has been 
aborted in the Jewish child, I regret to say, 
through centuries of urban restrictions. But 
this enthusiasm for the beauties and the glories 
of the world must be restored to him ; not, how- 
ever, the spurious enthusiasm which, like 
Bengal light, dies out while it sputters ; but the 
true and sane enthusiasm, based upon genuine 
and affectionate interest. The fear that the 
Jewish child may slip into paganism is unwar- 
ranted, for love of nature goes well with 
the finest spirituality. In fact, only men of 
imagination can attain to a right admiration 
of nature. Besides, there is a discipline of 
the soul in the respect for the beauty and 
majesty of nature. Joseph loves his sheep, 
even while he dreams of kinghood, Moses is 
a shepherd while he prepares to challenge a 
king, and the Ten Commandments are for- 
ever associated with thunder and lightning and 
the solemn grandeur of Mt. Sinai. The Nile, 
the Desert, the Jordan, the hills, valleys and 
springs of Palestine appeal to childhood, while 
he is emerging into contact with the world of 
nature. 



76 AIMS OF TEACHING 

MORAL IDEALISM. 

At this period the teacher can initiate con- 
scious morality. It is not sufficient to establish 
conventional ethics, for that implies a mechan- 
ical way of living. We must introduce a moral 
ideal. This is a difficult task for the teacher; 
but when he succeeds in it, the child enters 
upon a nobler and truer morality. The Jewish 
Religious School should foster moral idealism, 
for that idealism has constituted the religion of 
the Jew in the past and is his "mission" in the 
future. The difference between the Public 
School and the Jewish Religious School lies in 
this very fact that the secular school does not 
aim at more than discipline, while the Jewish 
School goes beyond mere lawful conduct and 
works for a moral ideal. We Jews have a moral 
mission ; that is, we are not satisfied with com- 
monplace goodness. We stand for a high type 
of life yet to be ; we want to live our lives with a 
larger outlook. We must, therefore, implant 
into Jewish childhood a conscience, not one 
which merely approves and disapproves what 
has been done or neglected, but a conscience 
which directs. This conscience which we wish 
to enthrone in childhood is not merely an ad- 
visor nor a monitor nor a judge; it does not 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 11 

look backward at what has been done and at 
what has not been done ; the Jewish conscience 
points the way, it commands the doing and 
prohibits the not doing. This moral idealism 
stirs in children at the period when they begin 
to look with clearer vision upon life, when the 
wider interest begins to assert itself. 

We must guard against leaving our children 
superficial in matters of conduct. We must 
not let them be satisfied with mere "correct- 
ness," for that would be morality without 
spirit, a matter-of-fact morality which ends, 
as in the case of material things, with the profit 
or the loss. This "practical," "useful" interest 
has impoverished the ethics of modern Jews. 
It has taken the spiritual snap out of them and 
it is so insidious that we ought to be very suspi- 
cious of it. Jewish children should be given the 
traditional Jewish genius of morality, so that 
they may regard truth and justice and the 
virtues not as a policy, but as the Will of God. 
Child idealism may lack precision and insight 
and reach ; but through it the child enters into 
conscious moral relations and gets control of 
them ; he w^ants to take part in the larger life. 
Never are the moral discriminations so intense 
as at this period of childhood, for the child has 



78 AIMS OF TEACHING 

so much to which he must adjust himself. He is 
face to face, not only with problems, but also 
with high and noble needs. This is the age of 
moral enthusiasms, when everything suggests a 
Utopia. And its piety is its finest Utopia. 

THE MATERIAL. 

The Biblical material for this Grade com- 
prises the biography of Joshua, the history of 
the Judges and the biographies of Saul, David 
and Solomon. It is the story of a moral 
progression. It is the period in which the 
Prophets arise. The growth is from self-asser- 
tion of a crude kind, typified by the war in 
the Story of the Invasion, to moral self-asser- 
tion and personal morality, as in David and 
the ethical wisdom of Solomon. 

The teacher should treat this period from 
the point of view, not of its politics, but of 
its morality. Neither the teacher nor the pupil 
is a warrior or a statesman. History has an 
entirely different educational content for chil- 
dren. It is the drama of morals, the story of 
the effort people make to adjust themselves to 
one another. Israel is endeavoring to build for 
itself a home in a new country, an ideal 
home. Joshua has the stamina of a pioneer. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 79 

Saul, David and Solomon are moral proto- 
types, and the teacher must exhibit their 
soul-difficulties, so that the child may recognize 
in them his own moral struggles and find what 
he may emulate and what he must avoid. 
They are not placed before the child as "copy" 
entirely worthy of imitation. Just as in the 
adult world the good goes side by side with the 
bad, so the child must accustom himself to the 
experience that he is environed by the virtuous 
and the vicious and that he must make a choice 
between them. He must also learn that we have 
both sides of Saul or David in us, that the evil 
may drag us down, if we let it, and that the 
good may lift us up, if we help. 

We have so far traced the child from depend- 
ence through interdependence to a sense of self 
and into responsibility. We must now guide it 
so that it may evenually acquire a quality of 
decided personality. 

GOD IS A MORAL PERSONALITY. 

In keeping with their awakening conception 
of themselves is the children's conception of 
God. They are impressed not so much by 
power as by the spirit in the world. While 
they are not capable, of course, of perceiving 



80 AIMS OF TEACHING 

the immanence of God in the phenomena 
of the world, they scent it, as it were, by intui- 
tion. Just as the horizon of their Hves is ex- 
panding beyond their home, and the world is 
becoming complex for them, so God seems to 
rule not by mere power, but in sublimated 
and moral w^ays. At this stage superstitions 
arise. Superstitions are interpretations of 
experience in terms of beliefs which were potent 
in a former stage of cultural development. 
They are displaced by explanations that com- 
port with our present cultural status. Here, 
then, a two-fold problem arises ; first, we must 
crowd back the fears the child has, and second, 
we must suggest a sense of safety. The sub- 
missiveness which comes through the convic- 
tion that a moral personality presides over the 
world is of a higher type than that which has 
its source in fear of physical force. Since the 
child aspires to be a personality to be counted 
with, he invests God with a similar a moral ego. 
At first, God does things according to child- 
motive and child-purpose. But the next step 
in the child-religion will be toward a God 
who acts with right reason and just will. 
This really moral conception of God, however, 
does not arise in the child suddenly and with- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 81 

out preparation. The progress is on a line from 
a God who is thunder and Hghtning, to a God 
who is mind and will. It is the function of 
the teacher to lead the child to a recognition 
of its moral self and to a spiritual interpreta- 
tion of God and the world. 

Here the divergence between the Jewish 
and the non-Jewish child is complete. For 
the Jewish child, the transition from the sense 
of a physically powerful God to a moral God 
is like coming into his own. 



82 AIMS OF TEACHING 

SIXTH GRADE. 

The point of view of the teacher in the 
Sixth Grade is that the children vacillate 
between whim and will, between what they do 
according to their impulses and what they do 
in conformity with the Law which is enforced 
upon them. 

THE RISE OF PERSONALITY. 

The moral problem for this Grade is to 
become conscious of the fact that the Law of 
Society is sovereign and that they owe obe- 
dience to it. Another side of the problem is 
that the children not only recognize a law that 
controls their relations to others, but that they 
also establish within themselves a moral order 
that holds in check their wishes and passions, 
and makes personality dominant over them. 

The distinction must be made between laws 
and Law. For as long as injunctions are neces- 
sary, the child has no sense of right, sufficient 
and forceful by itself. It should not be neces- 
sary to come constantly to the aid of the moral 
insight of the child; he should be able to 
decide by his own moral discrimination. Only 
when he sees the alternatives of a moral issue 
and can choose between them, has he acquired 
a moral character. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 83 

AUTHORITY. 

This involves the subject of authority. Some 
authority handicaps the child, robbing him of 
his initiative in a moral choice. There are times 
when the child must be given freedom to decide 
independently on matters involving right and 
wrong, and when the responsibility must ulti- 
mately rest in his own soul. He must not only 
seize hold of action, but also assume respon- 
sibility for what he has determined upon. The 
child passes through a period when he is very 
eager to assert himself, but he must learn how, 
and when and toward whom he may make this 
self-assertion; that he must establish an in- 
dependent moral judgment. 

The following are the steps of progression in 
this recognition of authority. The first step is 
conformity. The child does what others do. 
Parents, elders, teachers are right, just because 
they are parents, elders and teachers. This is 
not blind obedience, for the child conforms for 
another reason than subordination. He imi- 
tates out of love and admiration, because the 
elders are prototypes beyond whom he does not 
wish to go. This first step is in keeping with the 
child's natural instincts, which can always be 
trusted and followed. Out of this conformity 
to right types is born obedience, one of the es- 



84 AIMS OF TEACHING 

sential virtues. On the lowest level, obedience 
is merely conformity. This kind of obedience 
requires no surrender of wish or will. The 
conflict, indeed, of will with authority begins 
later, is inevitable, and offers a healthful exer- 
cise in discrimination. It disciplines and en- 
lightens the will. 

SUBORDINATION. 

The second step in moral progress as to 
authority consists in subordination. This calls 
for intelligence of a higher kind. Blind con- 
formity is not moral, for insight is necessary 
to make a decision moral. The teacher must 
not force the pupil to "mind," for "mind- 
ing" dulls the character as well as the in- 
tellect. Submission to authority must be 
voluntary and reasonable if it is to be moral at 
all. Of course, there is a kind of check which 
helps to train. But this must not paralyze the 
child's personality, or else there will be nothing 
left to train or to discipline. Where there is 
no conscious personality, it is not worth while 
to bother about training. We must always 
preserve freedom, the initiative in the child. 
In the Jewish child especially we must respect 
individualism. The moral genius of the Jew- 
ish people lies in that. The pedagogy which 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 85 

prevails in Jewish homes deals very kindly and 
very delicately with individualism. The perse- 
cutions Jews have suffered might have de- 
moralized them if these domestic counter-in- 
fluences had not upheld their self-consciousness 
and their moral stamina. 

Child-individualism, however, is not entitled 
to indulgence and free scope all around. Here 
the teacher will have to be watchful, for he is 
face to face with a serious problem in general 
education and also with a special danger 
in Jewish life. We all know the opinionated, 
wilful and pampered child of today. We come 
across him frequently in Jewish homes in which 
parents otherwise evidence tact and control. 
It is on this account that this Grade constitutes 
an epochal chapter in the moral education of 
the Jewish child. 

We must help the child to self-restraint and 
respect for authority, not merely when this 
authority is obviously reasonable and com- 
pliance with it profitable, but when it appeals 
to the higher aspects of life. In a certain sense, 
conformity comes from admiration of an ideal ; 
the child believes this ideal is incarnate in the 
father, mother and teacher, and wants to live 
up to it. 

Subordination is best when it is allied with 



86 AIMS OF TEACHING 

the admiration of a moral personality. The 
child should respect authority because he 
has the ambition to rise to its level. The 
Jewish child appears to regard authority as 
something of possible approach, and this is a 
very promising attitude. The best appeal 
of authority lies in the fact that it is not 
alien to us, but contains something kindred 
with us, that we can lift ourselves up to it and 
be at one with it. Familiarity with authority 
does not breed contempt against it, but affec- 
tion for it. A Jewish child makes light of re- 
spect only when the authority set over it is 
unreal, and it loves, admires and respects just 
as soon as the authority is genuine and is not 
captious. The Jewish child can be trained 
into obedience when he is shown an ideal ; the 
ideal, however, must not be mere vague ideal- 
ization, but should present a definite aim worth 
striving for. 

FEAR. 

The characteristic quality of Jewish ethics is 
the union of moral aspiration with fear. It 
comes to us from the most ancient period of 
Jewish religiousness. Modern thinkers regard 
"fear" as archaic and cannot fit it in with free- 
dom and responsibility. According to popular 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 87 

notion, fear is abject and cowardly, and some 
teachers want to reform fear out of the 
reUgion. But nothing in our practical times 
is needed more than genuine "fear," which 
sanctifies childhood with modesty. Modesty 
should be in the soul of the child in its dealing 
with men and the problems of life. It should 
bring the child to feel that wisdom and strength 
have their limitations. This subtle quality 
of fear makes the difference between the 
ethics of the world and the ethics of the Jew. 
All other kinds of morality pay in one 
way or another, but Jewish morality never 
paid, never will and never should pay. The 
moral doctrines of the creeds and of the 
political codes cannot satisfy the ethical 
ideal of the Jew. The basis of Jewish 
morality is the fear of God and the fear of 
sin; virtue goes with fear, as reverence does. 
Fear seeks God and does not avoid Him ; fear 
faces God, truth, virtue, life, death. Fear, far 
from paralyzing moral activity, tempers it 
with delicacy and piety. The fear of God 
plays the most important role in Jewish ethics ; 
it gives character to all the forms of 
conduct. Fear, in fact, is in morals what 
belief is in doctrine. Fear is the moral scent 
of the presence of God. We have fear when we 



88 AIMS OF TEACHING 

feel the sanctity of life. Fear may seem mystic, 
but we have no mystics in Judaism, which is 
a most realistic religion. Fear faces the light, 
and the moral significance of fear lies in the 
fact that it demands that we should be very 
clear about God and the world. The scientist 
and the artist know God and fear Him better 
than the commonplace people; they have the 
great .awe of life and nature, though they are 
very near Him. 

It is not a question of degree, as if the fear 
of God were ultimate and fear of father and 
mother secondary. To subordinate oneself to 
Law enlarges the soul and lets God enter it; 
to subject oneself to parental authority, lets 
parental wisdom operate in the child-life. 
Fear is the appreciation on the part of 
the child that his moral life is linked with that 
of the parent. There is a moral union between 
parent and child. Filial awe has always gone 
into adult Jewish life and has secured the 
moral continuity of the Jewish people. 

I have spoken of fear at some length 
because of its prime significance in Jewish 
morality. It is bound up with our life, it is 
the strain of our blood, it is the law of our 
souls. It is not sufficient for the Jewish teacher 
to inculcate general moralities ; he must foster 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 89 

the specific spirit of Jewish ethics. The Relig- 
ious Schools need not, nowadays, teach the 
commonplace virtues, or repress the well- 
known vices; the secular schools do that. In 
the Jewish Schools we have other work to do ; 
we must secure the Jewishness of morality, in- 
culcate our reasons why children should be 
true, right, faithful, loyal. And I need not say 
that in morals everything depends on the 
why. Fear in Jewish morality is a "why," 
a reason and a motive. Fear of God makes for 
loyalty to God's Law; fear of parents makes 
for filial loyalty; and fear of truth makes for 
virtue. We must aim high in Jewish ethics. 
Fear is the high-water mark of morality. 
And fear is thoroughly religious morality, for 
it puts God into the heart of life and makes 
God's presence the center of the conscience. 
Fear is fundamental. Of course, being afraid 
is not the same as having fear; indeed, religious 
fear and awe are the very opposite of cowardly 
fear. Fear of God makes for confidence and 
trust in Him. The naive ideals, the pieties of 
the child at this period are a preparation for this 
fear. 

SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF VIRTUE. 

It should be clear to the teacher that he can- 
not teach the virtues on the ground of the 



90 AIMS OF TEACHING 

personal advantage they bring. They have a 
social bearing and their significance lies not in 
what they do for us, but in the moral kinship to 
which they lead us in our relation to others. 
The maxim that "Honesty is the best policy" is 
spurious, for it implies that we are after advan- 
tages. No genuine virtue begins and ends with- 
in one's self. The normal development which 
takes place at this period of childhood comprises 
not merely the child's own body, the child's 
own satisfactions and the child's own inner 
being, but also the child's conduct toward other 
people. We are turning the face of virtue, as 
it were, toward the outside. The larger-sensed 
ethics of today, which declares that our conduct 
reaches into the lives of others, we Jews have 
cultivated through ages of solidarity. In the 
period with which we are dealing in this Grade, 
nothing is so striking as the child's unselfish- 
ness. It is an anticipation of adult, broad 
and inclusive Jewish morality. The Jewish 
point of honesty is openness to others, not 
merely consistency within oneself ; readiness to 
do assigned work because it is a general benefit; 
industriousness as a prompt response to 
just demands. The social interpretation of 
motives, at this period of childhood, may be 
given in an elementary way, for the child at 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 91 

this age is not yet social; that is, he does not 
yet know the precise bearings his Hfe has to- 
ward others. But the suggestion of it is timely. 

FELLOWSHIP. 

From fear in conduct to fear in wor- 
ship seems a natural step. This period marks 
the beginning in worship. Worship in its 
initial stage, indeed, is moral. The ritual form 
comes later. Up to this Grade worship was 
prayer, individual prayer. From now on it 
becomes social, communal; the form of wor- 
ship may become more rigid and more elab- 
orate. Worship, too, must comport with child- 
psychology; we must make ritual express the 
simple interests of child-life. Remember that 
the line of growth in child-life, at this period, is 
from isolation to companionship. The child is 
now forming comradeships and friendships, 
and craves for attachments. The child experi- 
ences the elation of feeling when he finds that 
another shares his interest and his ideal. This 
dawning sense of communion is at the heart of 
child worship ; though, of course, in a very lim- 
ited sense. This child-worship is not yet ser- 
vice and its prayer is merely Thanksgiving 
and Praise; for worship, too, proceeds on 
the lines of development. What is worship for 



92 AIMS OF TEACHING 

an adult is not worship for the child; and 
the worship of a child is something other than 
the worship of youth. Just now, worship is 
the expression of fellowship, of the fitting-in 
with other children, made possible because they 
have similar moral needs and moral satis- 
factions. The solemnity of the worship lies in 
this consonance. It comes out of the hearts of 
the children, and no formality or ritual can 
bring it into them. Here, too, we must change 
the front of things. Solemnity must not pro- 
ceed from the pulpit to the pew, but from the 
pew up to the pulpit. The same truth applies 
to child- worship. An imitation of adult wor- 
ship, a small edition of the Prayer Book, or 
prayer in short syllables, is mere caricature. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 93 

SEVENTH GRADE. 

This is the age at which children are at their 
greatest activity. The body is developing and 
seeks adjustment to the new physical functions. 
The mind, too, I should rather say the psychical 
constitution, is agitated in every direction of 
mental and moral reach and endeavors to 
establish right connections. The children are 
becoming conscious of themselves ; their sense 
of muscular strength is a sort of reassurance of 
themselves that they possess a new power. This 
physical satisfaction often makes the bully. 
A bully is one who gets pleasure out of the use 
of strength. The problem is to lead him to use 
that strength rightly, upon proper occasions 
and for good ends. The training begins with 
showing that brutal strength without control 
is useless and wrong, that real manliness lies 
in a wise and fair use of power. Many a young 
bully learns to employ his physical resources 
in good causes and becomes a leader of men. 
The rudimentary passion to bully somehow 
and somebody is in each child. The observant 
teacher can use this passion for the develop- 
ment of healthy manliness. The crude asser- 
tion of self is the first expression of a grow- 
ing sense of manhood and should be respected 
and helped. 



94 AIMS OF TEACHING 

SELF-ASSERTION. 

The Jewish child especially should get at- 
tention from the teacher with regard to this. 
For self-assertion has been denied the Jew 
through centuries of persecution and discour- 
agement, and a frank declaration of the inner 
life and a healthy exercise of the natural 
impulses would bring a fine uplift to him. 
The teacher must provide for a free exercise 
of all the instincts which speak out in child- 
hood, so that the Jew may acquire pride in 
physical strength as a God-given power which 
restriction and suppression have forced him 
to neglect. But, of course, he must use it under 
the direction of morality. The Jew has main- 
tained himself in a hostile world only by 
self-control; and his philosophic temper has 
not paralyzed his natural impulses. The 
world must, in all justice, admire the "pa- 
tience and suffering of our tribe." For his 
endurance has been sane; it has not run to 
seed in puritanism and asceticism, and fits 
in with the aggressive and enterprising spirit of 
the modern world. Still we shall always have 
the problem as to the consciousness of self. 
In the first place, we must give the Jewish 
child scope for wholesome exercise and induce 
him to love athletics, and in the second place 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 95 

we must moralize these physical activities, that 
is, we must subordinate the passion for sport, 
so that the exuberance of health may not de- 
generate into brutality. Character must dom- 
inate flesh. 

SELF-CONTROL. 

The restlessness of which parents and teach- 
ers in Public and Religious Schools com- 
plain is not pathological, it indicates the hunger 
for activity. The restlessness of many chil- 
dren is not "nervousness," but inability to 
employ physical resources rightly; it is fre- 
quently originates in a moral diflSculty and rep- 
resents an incapacity to check the impulses 
urged by healthy life. The child has not been 
given ability to control them, and lacks direc- 
tion into which to lead them; he possesses 
resources of health and has not learned how 
to use them for right and moral ends. The 
so-called nervous child becomes tractable just 
as soon as he is interested in some definite 
work — that is, just as soon as his personality 
is awakened. He will use his intellectual and 
moral energy when there is a cause or an in- 
terest for which to employ it. But this cause 
should not be a mere child-cause, or else the 
work will be not much more than empty play. 
The discerning teacher should suggest an ap- 



96 AIMS OF TEACHING 

propriate interest out of which the child can 
build a larger self. 

IMAGINATION AND SYMPATHY. 

One ot the means with which we can enhance 
this developing life of the child is fancy and 
imagination. After all, fancy and imagination 
are at the basis of morality. No one can feel 
sympathy, no one can do justice, unless he can 
"put himself in another's place." This imag- 
inary placing of oneself into the position of an- 
other, this vivid realization of what is going on 
in another person is a moral effort. To culti- 
vate fancy, therefore, is a discipline on the 
direct line of moral and religious growth. At 
this period childhood cries out, as it were, 
for the food which it needs. To be sure, 
the fancy must not be weird and undiscrimin- 
ating, and much depends upon the pedagogic 
tact of the teacher to prevent it from becoming 
such. He must direct the child's reading, for 
reading is a substitute for experience; it sup- 
plies idealized experience and lifts the sordid 
facts of daily life to high levels. 

MORALITY AND IDEALISM. 

Here, too, the Jewish teacher has a special 
obligation. The Jew is said to be a realist; 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 97 

to be sure, the Jew has had to take the world 
as it is. Those in whose midst he Uved 
were sternly set against him, and he could 
ill afford to be a dreamer. But he did not allow 
himself to become despiritualized by this 
stress, and it is not too much to claim 
that he has been a classicist in idealism, 
despite the fact that his history is a record of 
broken hopes and embittered disappointments. 
But the Jewish child of today is in danger of 
lapsing into practicalities. This danger can be 
met only by stirring his imagination. Morality 
is always poetic. A morality which lifts the 
soul above the commonplace is the kind of 
morality which we should give to our children. 
We glory in the fact that the Jewish people 
has given to the world the psalms and that 
it produced poets and hymnists while the 
persecutions raged about it in the Middle 
Ages, and we boast of the many poets of Jew- 
ish birth, but what are we doing to produce 
poets and idealists today, or what are we 
doing to sustain the average Jew in higher 
aspirations ? If Judaism is to live, it must be 
more than a mere confession of dogmatic 
theorems ; and if Jews are to hold their place in 
the forefront of culture, they must live by a 
moral and religious ideal. Poetry, like religion, 



98 AIMS OF TEACHING 

has a practical bearing on life. We need the 
poetic temperament in our every-day virtues. 
We must moralize life by it. We shall not train 
the new generation of Jewish children for a 
right place in life, unless we soften their 
lives with the solvent of sentiment. The Jewish 
people will be strong, in the ethical sense of 
the word, when it has learned to ally the prac- 
tical with the ideal. We must train Jewish 
children in keenness of feeling and cheeriness 
of nature. In all his history the Jew has 
resented nothing more strenuously than being 
pitied. He found sufficient comfort and en- 
couragement in himself. If the next generation 
of Jews is to be loyal to the faith of their fathers, 
we must build up in them delight in the gifts 
of life. Our children should live their lives as 
masters, not by vulgar force but by refined and 
high-gauged moralities. 

QUESTIONS AND GROW^TH. 

This is also the age in which children delight 
in asking many questions which embarrass 
conscientious parents and teachers. The ques- 
tions call for a clear statement of facts, 
the more difficult just because the questions are 
elementary and obvious. There is promise 
in this persistence of inquiry. The children 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 99 

must absorb much, in order to adjust them- 
selves to the civiUzation in which they are 
to Hve, and they must learn many facts, 
familiar to us but new to childhood. 
We should sympathize with the child while 
he is in the throes of the birth of his intel- 
lect and character. We should reply to chil- 
dren's questions with scrupulousness and 
sympathy. Parents and teachers should respect 
this child-curiosity and should be on the alert 
to satisfy it. Many a parent has laid the 
foundation for a life-long reverence for high 
themes by a right reply, and many a parent 
lays the foundation of frivolity toward the 
finer aspects of life by an indifferent answer. 
The little inquirer comes with childish puzzles 
and innocent ecstasies about God and heaven 
and angels and those charming mysteries out 
of which the finer texture of our soul-life is 
woven, and we have a holy responsibility how 
we receive or dismiss him. A child's question 
is an obligation upon us and we should be at 
our best, in forethought and sympathetic co- 
operation with the child, when we reply. The 
child regards his father and his teacher as all- 
informing oracles, and we must not disillusion 
him. However, children often ask questions for 
the sake of argument, and argument is a kind 



100 * AIMS OF TEACHING 

of fight. Children at this age like fight, fight 
in any form. For fight by way of argument is 
a show of strength, and strength pleases chil- 
dren. Besides, this contest of child-wisdom 
with adult-wisdom offers opportunities for in- 
tellectual training, the more likely to benefit 
the child since it originates in a real interest. 
The child-debates on the profound subject of 
religion may seem almost blasphemous, but we 
must scent the sanctities behind them. The 
child is serious and his questions should be 
responded to with equal seriousness ; and I su- 
spect that parents resent the inquiries of chil- 
dren mainly because they feel themselves in- 
competent to give the proper answers. But 
the teacher cannot shirk his duty; he cannot 
escape the responsibility for the injury that 
must inevitably come, if he neglect it. The 
questions of the child show that he is rediscov- 
ering the principles of life, the world and God, 
and all those truths which constitute religion. 
His insistence on his child-point of view is one 
of the happiest facts of the matter; he re- 
examines and revalues the truths with his own 
eyes and his own heart. Enlightenment and 
correction are not established by proving the 
child wrong. Character advances by sug- 
gestions and not by discouragement. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 101 

THE JEWISH CHILD AND INTELLECTUAL 
CURIOSITY. 

We hear much about the forwardness of the 
Jewish child, that he is wanting in shyness and 
well-bred reserve. I do not believe this indict- 
ment is justified, and can say much in defense 
of the Jewish child. He is acknowledgedly 
deferential toward the parents in the home and 
docile in home duties, and, on the whole, he ob- 
serves due regard toward elders and superiors. 
But, I confess, he is quite ready to "answer 
back" and is prone to take advantage of fami- 
liarities. I concede also that the Jewish child 
is quick to catch a point in a discussion and, 
if permitted, will drive on in it with self- 
assurance. But I should not condemn the 
ready wit and wisdom of childhood as alto- 
gether objectionable and bad. We should not 
object to the child holding his ground honest- 
ly in the face of opposition ; though we might 
find fault with his refusal to submit to authority 
when that authority is valid, reasonable and 
benevolent. The Jewish child likes to measure 
himself with the wit and the wisdom of his 
elders, whereas, I surmise, other children de- 
light in measuring themselves in physical 
rather than intellectual and moral strength. 



102 AIMS OF TEACHING 

This polemical habit of the Jewish child can, 
however, be directed to intellectual and 
moral interests and checked by tact and the 
proprieties. If the child is accorded too much 
scope for self-assertion, and his little wisdom 
is pampered, he may be encouraged to exag- 
gerate his worth and get a false standard of 
intellectual and moral values. Such calam- 
itous results are not infrequent and we cannot 
warn too much against them. But whenever 
this occurs, the source of the misfortune lies in 
the parents' weakness, who indulge the child- 
prattle and nurse a secret pride in it. Teachers 
must meet this difficulty and not infrequent- 
ly must undo the mistakes the parents have 
made. It is duty of the teaching profession to 
go beyond the school-room into the very heart 
of the home and the community. If parents 
commit a grave error, and jeopardize the 
morality of their children, the teachers must 
come to the rescue. 

VANITY. 

Looking at the matter more closely, it will 
be seen that vanity on the part of the parents 
entails vanity on the part of the child. The 
parents delight in the child's show of smartness, 
and the child ends in himself taking satisfac- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 103 

tion in it. The satisfaction increases with 
every added instance of approval and the 
child begins to take unction to his little soul. 
At this stage of its life, at any rate, he loves to 
pose. Pose, too, is a claim to superiority. By 
steady increments this pose may pervert the 
mental and moral perspective. Conceit, a most 
fatal illusion, may superinduce moral blind- 
ness. There are teachers who use the vanity of 
children in the interest of discipline. But the 
appeal to vanity is an appeal to a selfish motive 
and, therefore, bad, and the'teacher who builds 
up the moral life of the child upon an immoral 
basis sells it for the mess of pottage of his per- 
sonal ease. Teachers have a responsibility as 
to what motive they appeal to. Discipline is 
not begotten, at any rate, just to relieve the 
teacher of his hardships. We may make a child 
tractable to our will, but never by being indif- 
ferent to his moral health. To keep his develop- 
ment true and pure is the solemn duty of the 
teacher, and he dare not be recreant to it for 
any reason. 

CONTROL. 

At this child-period exacting commands 
are not a forceful form of discipline, for the 
child begins to feel that there is a difference 



104 AIMS OF TEACHING 

of degree in the demands made by the father, 
mother, teacher and superiors. A real ap- 
preciation of authority can exist only where 
there is discrimintion. A child conforms to 
another will only when he knows that his 
own will is not as wise nor as good nor as 
strong. Only a developed character can respect 
authority. The teacher must be cautious not 
to impose his will with summary force; he 
must not domineer over the child-per- 
sonality. Much of what we call obstinacy is 
provoked by arbitrariness on the part of the 
teacher. Obstinacy is more often misdirected 
than undirected will power, or it is will 
power that has been stopped without a fair 
reason. Obstinacy in the last instance is the 
honest effort we make to overcome the un- 
reasonable obstacle but in our way, for moral 
progress lies always on the road of free will. 
Nothing damages child-nature more than 
"breaking its will." The child will need his will 
all his life, and he must have moral freedom if 
he is to use his will at all. Will is the very soul 
of morality, and to endeavor to kill off the 
child's will, to break his will, is to demoralize 
him. Parents and teachers have authority over 
the child only to ripen his life, to guide him and 
to give him moral strength. They have no right 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 105 

to despoil the child of his self-respect, to keep 
him weak and helpless. Here caution must set 
in, lest we reduce the child to impotent depend- 
ence and impoverish his soul. We must not 
provoke him so that he snap back against the 
pressure in truculence. Obstinacy may sink in- 
to the deep places of the soul, from which it 
may be impossible to dislodge it. If obstinacy 
is not dealt with while it is in its beginnings, it 
will handicap the pupil in later life and will 
be harder to deal with. Right training fore- 
stalls and does not wait till the evil has set in. 
This conflict with the child's first declaration 
of will is serious for his further moral life. His 
later ability to adjust himself to the environ- 
ment depends upon his ability to conform to 
social conditions, to fit in with or be rebel- 
lious to the community. 

SENSE OF KINSHIP. 

For the Jewish child, this ability to conform 
to the environment is essential. Jewish solid- 
arity is nothing else than participation in moral 
interests. The teacher of the Jewish people 
must foster this ethical communion. That we 
have cause to complain about the decline of the 
Jewish spirit, of the loyalty which was formerly 
strong in Jewish life, is evident from the fact 



106 AIMS OF TEACHING 

that we must plead for it with grown men and 
women. The instinctive feeUng of loyalty, the 
response comes out of the child-soul imme- 
diately when the cause is good. The Jewish 
child-heart did not have to be trained in the 
radical virtue of loyalty, but we must train 
it now. Its kinships should mean much to it; 
they should stand in its sight as right and best. 
This is not chauvinism, nor prejudice; it means 
merely that the child should take his natural 
affiliations sincerely and seriously. 

We believe Judaism is a sound cause, that 
the world needs it and we give to it our en- 
thusiasm and our whole heart. Many influ- 
ences have built up this Jewish consciousness 
in us. It is a pity that today we have no con- 
structive influences, only schools and formal 
means, to sustain us in this. The public school 
must ignore the specific interpretations sacred 
to us, and the Religious School is not the organ 
through which the Jewish community speaks. 
But the justification for our work and the guar- 
antee of our confidence in the future lie in 
Jewish child-life. 

INDIVIDUALISM. 

At this age, individuality develops. In- 
dividuality has three forms. The first form 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 107 

is the subconscious sense of self and is 
necessary, for the moral life is based on "know- 
ing oneself." The second form is the sense of 
contrast, excluding or opposing others, and has 
its ground in the conviction that one can do 
things which others cannot. The last form of 
individuality bases its claim for the right of 
way in life on rounded personality. It is this 
last into which we should help the Jewish child- 
soul to flower. A balanced character, sure- 
ness in effort and endurance, these constitute 
personal morality in Judaism. 

We hear much in praise and in condemna- 
tion about the Individualism of the Jew. It 
may not be a flawless virtue, but neither is it 
an unmitigated vice. The individuality of the 
Jew has coexisted with the solidarity of Jews. 
Individualism did not tear them apart. It 
was not a solvent, neither of the community, 
nor of their communion. It did not disin- 
tegrate Israel during the persecutions. The 
attempts on the part of church and mis- 
sionaries to break it, failed ignominously. 
The Jew is an unperturbed personality in all 
the tragedies of his history. The union of the 
Jewish people is a moral one ; it is not conven- 
tional. Every Jew feels that his life touches 
every other Jew's. This sharpens his moral 



108 AIMS OF TEACHING 

alertness and makes every Jew feel that he is 
necessary to all of his people, and that he has a 
constant obligation toward them. 

This individuality begins in childhood, when 
the moral life is being established and the child 
endeavors to acquire use of its powers. Its 
boasts, poses and vanities are so many bids 
of the child for recognition as a personality. 
Jewish children pass through this period not 
with more boastfulness than other children, 
but with no less of it. Still, however this may 
be, self-regard must make way for regard for 
others, and the desire for justice for oneself 
prepares for social justice. 

DISCIPLINE. 

The teacher can get the best results of dis- 
cipline, not when he enforces summary com- 
pliance with the demands of his authority, but 
when he respects the moral capacity of the 
pupils. The appeal, for instance, to the chil- 
dren's self-effort will make allies of them. The 
best disciplinarian is not he who dominates, 
but he who sympathizes with child-nature. 

BOYS AND GIRLS. 

When boys and girls begin to go apart, the 
teacher must heed the sense of difference, 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS.. 109 

which they begin to feel and which will later 
on, at the age of adolescence, become pro- 
nounced aloofness. But, as yet, it is merely 
an unconscious premonition, and the children 
are naive about the two-fold division of the 
class-community. The relationship between 
boys and girls at this period is entirely frank 
and they feel as brothers and sisters. To the 
boy, a girl is somebody's sister, and a boy is 
somebody's brother. They have learned that 
justice, truthfulness and helpfulness are due 
from one to the other. Out of these moral re- 
lations between brothers and sisters, however, 
the "Brotherhood of Man" eventually develops. 
At a later epoch, the sex-difference will be- 
come more accentuated and make kinship and 
mutuality more difficult. While, therefore, the 
training in reciprocal duties had best begin 
now, the interpretation of sexuality must not 
be given with brutal frankness, whatever up- 
to-date experts may say, but with delicacy and 
a profound regard for its sanctity. Children 
should not be robbed of modesty, the purest 
and the best restraint which nature has devised 
and upon which practical wisdom cannot im- 
prove. I warn against the gross kind of sex- 
education, which frequently uncovers the sanc- 
tities of chastity, while it claims to protect 



110 AIMS OF TEACHING 

them. The brusqueness which boys show 
towards girls, on the one hand, and, on the 
other, the petulance of girls toward boys, sug- 
gest that both are beginning to recognize 
differences. Jewish children must learn to keep 
their natural instincts chaste. 

ADJUSTMENT TO ONE ANOTHER. 

The subject of co-education might here be 
touched on, not so much as a moral question 
of as one of pedadgogy. It may be urged that 
the association of boys and girls, doing the 
same task and sharing the same influences, in- 
duces them to co-operate with one another. 
But the question might be put in this way: 
Is it not timely, at this age, to provide for the 
adjustment of the one to the other.? The boy 
needs the prototype of manliness and the girl 
requires the example of womanliness. In 
grades of adolescents a man should teach boys 
and a woman should teach girls. The boy 
must learn how to adjust himself to woman- 
hood and the girl must learn how to adjust 
herself to manhood, for they will eventually 
enter into companionship in the home. 

This relationship should be more than gal- 
lantry and romance. The way should be pre- 
pared for the domestic sense upon which the 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. Ill 

best things of life are based. The domestic 
sense is our strength, and the School must con- 
tribute its share to develop it. The opportune 
time for supplying mutual respect between man 
and women is not when the adolescent period 
has already arrived, but when the boy and the 
girl deal with each other in naive frankness. 
The teacher should bear in mind the homes 
from which his pupils come and should look 
beyond the school-room into the time when 
these boys and girls will have matured for the 
highest and best functions of life. 

TEACHERS. 

In a later school-period it is advisable 
to provide a man as teacher for girls and a 
woman as teacher for boys. Boys need to ac- 
quire moral adjustment to womanhood, and 
girls to manhood, and both need intelligent and 
respectful attitudes for reciprocal relationship 
between them. It is possible that the school is 
feminizing the b6ys, for as long as woman 
teachers predominate. The growing boy must 
learn to understand womanhood and the girl 
must learn to understand manhood, since they 
will need one the other in adult life. 



112 AIMS OF TEACHING 

"principles" and lessons. 

The child should not be troubled by "princi- 
ples." The child needs some general state- 
ments and some rules which he may apply ; but 
theological generalities should be absolutely 
avoided. Modern pedagogy has driven all 
abstract formulas out of the school-room and 
forbids the teaching of "creed" in any subject. 
The object of education is to establish habits 
of conduct; we do not operate schools in the 
interest of abstract "truths." We teach and 
train so that children may become strong and 
true and good. If any "generalizations" come 
to the child, they grow out of the work, out of 
the child's own intellectual and moral experi- 
ence, and are developed in the course of the 
school life. 

The teacher plans his work for the school- 
year, so that the lessons which the Course 
comprises may fit into one another and fol- 
low a line of progression. Each educational 
aim culminates into a definite lesson. These 
lessons, which the pupils have worked out one 
after another, constitute an eventually unified 
whole. 

The catechism has no reference to training; 
it had its origin in the systematized thought of 
adults and was meant for adult-minds. The 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 113 

lessons, however, are worked out in the school- 
room and each part of them is the result of the 
children's own work, under the guidance of the 
teacher. 

These remarks apply to the subject of 
abstract instruction in general and have special 
application to the age with which we are deal- 
ing. Still, the child must get a larger sense or 
religion and ethics, for a character that pos- 
sesses no philosophy of life will be at the mercy 
of cases and casuistry. Without a large out- 
look and an all round vision, life will seem to 
the child a succession of isolated experiences 
and will lack unity. The child must be lifted 
above a fragmentary view of life and given a 
positive conviction of the fact that the world is 
right, good and worth trusting. 

For the present, therefore, every lesson 
should lodge in the child a standard of life. 
This standard will be modified and bettered 
in subsequent stages of growth; but the child 
should not be left to depend upon other people ; 
he should himself be able to solve a moral 
situation. The aim of school-discipline should 
be to give the child moral discrimination 
and initiative for action. This the child cannot 
have as long as the instruction is only by speci- 
fic rules. Moral instruction must culminate in 



114 AIMS OF TEACHING 

"moral truths" and "moral laws," but these 
must be the child's own and not the ready- 
made wisdom of adults. 

GOD. 

The source of moral truth and moral law 
is God. God, for the children of this Grade is 
a God of moralities. Till now, God was the 
Father, the Spirit, the Person, but now He be- 
gins to be an authority as to rights and duties. 
The terms "rights" and "duties" are used with 
qualification. Even with adults they are not 
fixed in meaning, and they are less so in the 
minds of children. Adults project their moral 
notions upon their God, and the God of chil- 
dren, too, comports with what they themselves 
think and feel. At this period we witness the 
pretty scruples of children and their native 
orthodoxies. When teachers refer to duties, the 
children supply them with pedantic exactness 
As never before God means a constant monitor 
and judge. The problem is to direct this most 
promising personal scrupulousness to sound 
moral interests. 

CHILD-ORTHODOXY. - 

Child-orthodoxy is different from adult- 
orthodoxy. The child is bent on doing certain 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 115 

things, not because he regards the thing in it- 
self important, but because he takes motives 
seriously. The orthodoxy of the child is al- 
together a matter of intense conscientiousness. 
He defers to customs because they appeal to 
him. Nature secures thus, as it were, a 
conservative force before the time of adoles- 
cence comes, when the craving for novelty and 
the passion for "reform" and the idealisms 
arise. Jewish teachers ought to welcome this 
temperamental conservatism. It is the ally of 
loyalty. The child-conscience should not be 
discouraged, nor given merely discarded forms 
of piety to play with, but should be allowed 
to take customs and traditions seriously, so as 
to afford loyalty a fair and sincere opportunity. 
The child should not later on discover that 
his loyalty was wasted. It is because teach- 
ers do not get near to the child-conscience and 
do not appreciate how serious it is, that the 
child lapses from his loyalty and, indeed, runs 
the risk of lapsing from the sincerities alto- 
gether. The stake, in this matter, is not merely 
ritual and ceremonies, but the child's moral 
integrity. Teachers should meet this early 
piety sympathetically, for out of it, if rightly 
treated, will develop the adult piety so much 
missed in modern life. 



116 AIMS OF TEACHING 

JEWISH CHILD-NATURE. 

This child-seriousness is not infrequently the 
basis of a fine ethical discrimination. If left 
untrained and undirected, this precious sensi- 
tiveness and self-contemplation may deter- 
iorate into moroseness and moral doubt. 
Under right treatment, however, it may become 
a healthy, cheerful, whole-souled, moral enthu- 
siasm. Jewish child-nature is well constituted 
to pass safely through this stage of piety and 
Jewish youth is benefited by abundant occa- 
sions for exercise in moral choices. Notice the 
difference at this period between Jewish and 
non-Jewish childhood. Non-Jewish children 
are prone to run away from home and to in- 
dulge in the passion of unrestricted freedom. 
But Jewish children do not. This anti-domes- 
ticity of the non-Jewish adolescent is explained 
scientifically; mankind lived a roaming exist- 
ence, and the child lives over again, as it were, 
those days of migration. But, while this law 
of recapitulation may apply to Jewish .child- 
hood, just as to any other, this period of the 
genetic account does not apply to him, for his 
loyalty to home and family is unbroken. No 
civilized people has gone through enforced 
migrations as much as has the Jewish, and we 
should therefore expect the recrudescence in 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 117 

the Jewish child. But the Jewish child does 
not run away and stays at home. We have here 
a splendid proof of the original moral genius 
of the Jew. The Jew is moral not because he 
possesses a correct system of ethics, but because 
his moral life has gone into his flesh and blood. 

REVERENCE. 

The complaint is general that the child of 
today has no reverence. But we must confess 
that we do not know how to train him in 
reverence. We know that reverence is similar 
to obedience. Obedience need not be a hard- 
ship; it may become a natural grace. Rever- 
ence, on the other hand, is a composite quality. 
It comprising confidence and admiration. He 
who cannot trust and admire, cannot revere. 
We must have an implicit trust that all is right 
and good, and we must feel certain that every- 
thing in our experience makes for the true and 
the just and the good, if we are to have rever- 
ence for God. 

Our sympathies must be keen, and we must 
admire what we see, though we may see with 
the eye of fancy only. Reverence, like obedi- 
ence,, is based on the fusion of confidence and 
admiration. A child that does not respect his 
elders cannot be obedient to them. The child 



118 AIMS OF TEACHING 

that is self-conscious cannot subordinate him- 
self. Filial respect is voluntary subordination 
to parent and elders. Out of domestic respect 
develop religious reverence and submissiveness 
to God. Where the one is, the other is, and 
where filial devotion is not, the other cannot be. 
So also as to confidence. If it is true that 
the child of today has no reverence, the cause 
may lie in the fact that the modern parent, 
despite all willingness to labor for home and 
family, does not evoke confidence in his child. 
The home does not give moral re-enforcement 
and the companionship between parent and 
child is often, if not frivolous, trivial. The 
average father is not a hero to his boy, and the 
average boy is not sure that his father can 
never be wrong. Besides, influences other than 
those of the parent, go into child-life nowadays. 
The moral cleavage of offspring from parent 
takes place very early in the child-life, making 
loyalty and respect difficult. 

THE PARENT AND THE CHILD. 

Admiration of a parent is an elation of 
feeling which urges emulation. The child may 
wonder at his father and still not admire him. 
Wonder is the suspension of action, it is intel- 
lectual paralysis; but admiration is moral 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 119 

dynamics that stirs to imitation. The child who 
admires his father wants to do what the father 
does. It would be a sad day when children 
should have to look for exemplars in books and 
stories instead of in the people about him. That 
father fails who does not stir his child into 
hero-worship. It is futile to complain that 
the child does not feel reverence toward high 
things, as long as so direct a relationship as 
that of parent fails to touch its soul. The 
father should be able to thrill his moral 
stamina. The exaltation we call reverence is 
a move toward moral uplift. The child 
should see God as a projection, as it were, of 
his father's "greatness," "power" and "wis- 
dom." The child reverence should act as a 
incentive and a spur and compel moral am- 
bition. I fear that we think of the lifting of 
the cap, genuflections and subdued voices, 
when we urge reverence and respect, or seek it 
at altars, in temples, vestments and books. But 
sound reverence invests common things with 
moral value and interest. The readiness to 
obey is the first step toward the appreciation 
of the authority of God, and reverence for it 
is the second. 



120 AIMS OF TEACHING 

CEREMONIES AND REVERENCE. 

The duty of the parent and of the teacher is 
to offer to the child muhiphed opportunities for 
obedience, for confidence, for admiration. To 
enforce ceremonies under the supposition that 
they train the reUgious spirit is unpedagogic 
and unpsychological. The moral problem can- 
not be solved from the outside of the child. It 
is futile to insist on the child's conforming to 
ritual and formalities, before he has acquired 
a moral and religious sense. Teachers 
should not teach ritual and ceremony as 
facts to be known, for such instruction 
begets hypocrisy; children induced to ob- 
serve ceremonies without heart, become obtuse 
in religious feeling. Perfunctoriness will al- 
ways lead to immorality. It is not surprising 
that sectarian institutions fail to establish re- 
verence through their method; but it is that 
they do not thus repress moral growth alto- 
gether. Perhaps some of the irreligiousness 
of the present day may be charged to this kind 
of instruction. Religious Pedagogy does not 
worry about the alleged lapse from traditions 
and customs ; it knows that the child will per- 
form religious tasks voluntarily just as soon as 
he has respect for them. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 121 

CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 

A word as to congregational worship is in 
place here. It is a subject of current discus- 
sions from the point of need of expediency 
rather than of significance. A child be- 
comes Catholic through the sacrament ad- 
ministered by the priest. His attendance at 
worship is essential. The dogmatic interpreta- 
tion of church attendance goes through all the 
Christian denominations with more or less in- 
sistence. But it does not apply to the Jewish 
child. He does not become a Jew through a 
sacramental act, and his attendance at worship 
is an expression only of feelings and needs. His 
participation in public worship is his expression 
that he shares in the loyalties and aspirations 
which Jews have in common. It is also an 
exercise and discipline ; the main aim of syna- 
gogue worship is educational and pedagogical. 
Jewish adults, as well as children, attend ser- 
vices and take part in the ritual, not because 
their religious status is incomplete without such 
services, but because the influence of the syna- 
gogue is designed to train their religious life. 

Public worship is the expression of the soul- 
kinship of the people. From this point of view, 
congregational worship is dictated by the feel- 
ings of community and solidarity. The historic 



122 AIMS OF TEACHING 

influences have gone into the souls of Jews 
aHke and they have a common need arising 
from these similar experience. Every man 
craves enlargement of his consciousness, and 
finds in his household, his kindred, his people, 
those who share his past and his ideals. 
Attendance at Temple worship, accordingly, 
is an expression of our alliance with our kind. 
We want to be with those who have come 
whence we have come, who go where we are 
going, who have the same interests in life and 
who bear responsibilities such as we bear. 
Community of interest constitutes a congrega- 
tion. It is not individual wants that brings 
men to the Temple; ideals make a congrega- 
tional assembly. 

It is an illusion to suppose we are dealing 
with a congregation just because the children 
sit in pews like the grown folks. Every ar- 
rangement of the Religious School Service 
made on the presumption that it is for a child- 
congregation is not based on the fact. He who 
has listened to a School or a class read the 
responses prescribed by the Hymnbook or the 
Prayerbook is struck by the fact that each 
child reads at his own speed, as if each were 
alone. Morally the child is, indeed, alone and 
apart. Concerted reading by children is 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 123 

merely an aggregate of individuals reading in 
mass ; it is unison in voice, not unanimity in 
feeling. In adult worship a congregation joins 
in the Responsive Readings under the stress 
of a common religious exaltation, and the con- 
gregation is at the time of its worship a Com- 
posite Soul, as it were, out of which every 
private interest is eliminated and into which all 
common interests are merged. But children 
have no such capacity for communion, they 
cannot de-individualize themselves. The school 
exercise in worship should, therefore, be con- 
structed with due appreciation of this fact and 
should never be an imitation of the adult serv- 
ice. To be sure the child-service should pre- 
pare for the later elaborate, adult form, and 
there is some ground for the claim that the 
child should be led to love forever the words 
in which he expressed his first devotions. But 
he will remember them only when they have 
had the right ring for him, when they meant 
and carried real devotion. 



124 AIMS OF TEACHING 

THE EIGHTH GRADE. 

This period of life works out a crisis. The 
body is adolescent and there are concomitant 
changes in character. An adjustment to other 
persons is taking place and social interests 
develop. All this is going on unconsciously. 
The educator must bring moral order into this 
stressful condition and help the youth emerge 
out of it with control of the physical powers, 
well-balanced mind activity and a firm will in 
right interests. The several educational agen- 
cies must co-operate to lay the foundations for 
a sound life, for if the youth is served by only 
one of them he must suffer in those qualities 
which the others might have cultivated. 
Secular education cannot prepare adequately 
for the vocations, the professions and the social 
relations, since back of them must be will and 
discrimination. No one can do work without 
a moral motive, and the value of what we do 
depends on the purpose for which we do it. The 
youth, therefore, is not served when he has 
been taught a trade, but when he is enabled to 
take up his trade in the right ethical spirit. If 
he enters a "learned" profession, it is not suf- 
ficient that he knows it, but that he uses his 
knowledge for proper ends. And it is, above 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 125 

all, essential that his expanding human in- 
terests be lifted into higher levels where he may 
free himself from the pressure of the conven- 
tional and the sordid. Secular education with- 
out religious and moral refinement is defective, 
just as religious and moral influences unrelated 
to the facts of real life are mere cant. 

The boy and the girl at this age need guid- 
ance into moral interests more than into bread- 
winning occupations. Their entrance into the 
commonwealth without right moralization 
would be a menace to all that is stable and safe. 
For a wage-earner who cannot use his wages 
for legitimate ends is a hindrance to the com- 
munity, and if his interest in the community is 
limited to the profit he gets out of it he is a 
parasite. It is the moral interests that give a 
man a place in the community and a sense of 
significance of his own life. Since, as a matter 
of fact, the largest percentage of boys and girls 
of the adolescent period enter the wage-earning 
occupations almost directly from school, and 
among them not a small number of Jewish 
children, the duty devolves upon it to equip 
them so that they be strong in body, chaste 
and sane in the exercise of health, clear and en- 
lightened as to the relations they must enter 
into with their fellowmen, and pure and 



126 AIMS OF TEACHING 

elevated in the interpretation of life, with in- 
terests in right directions and will power for 
proper choices and decisions. 

It is not without recognition of these facts 
that school and business mark a division at 
this age. The pupil either passes from the 
lower to the high school or leaves school 
altogether to "go to work." This is, indeed, a 
crucial time for youth, and it should have the 
benefit of such avowed moral influence as the 
Religious School can provide. This timely 
service is called for not merely to help youth to 
meet the difficulties that now come into its 
way and to spare it the distractions which 
tempt it, but also to co-operate with it in its 
effort to acquire capacity to "earn a living," 
which is in the main a question of manhood and 
womanhood. Then again, the community has 
a great deal at stake in this, for its weal and 
destiny are determined by the kind of adults 
recruited into it. 

THE SELF. 

The adolescents are developing an essential 
function by which the life and the culture of 
the race are ever renewed. The body under- 
goes vital changes and the soul adjusts itself 
to a new interpretation of life. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 127 

The first sign of the matured self is the pride 
felt in physical excellence. Hence loudness on 
the part of the boy and showiness on the part of 
the girl. Also craftiness and insinuating man- 
ner, in search of advantages. The self-assurance 
which the boy exhibits must not be taken at 
its own valuation, of course, and should be led 
toward self-judgment. But there is a whole- 
some promise of stamina in this consciousness 
of self, upon which some of the strong elements 
of character rest. The opposite to this is shy- 
ness or modesty which appears not infrequent- 
ly at the age of puberty. It indicates a new 
and perplexing sense of self ; and if it is coupled 
with distrust, it may unman the character, 
and unfit the young man for the free exercise 
of his faculties. This condition calls for the 
teacher's discriminating influence, so that ori 
the one hand vanity may be checked and, on 
the other, self-distrust enlightened and self- 
reliance established. 

This is the age of ideals, but of ideals with 
regard to the self. The boy does not dream of 
improving the world. He thinks and plans only 
about his own elevation. This is as it should 
be at this period of excessive individualism. 

Coupled with these are the qualities of dig- 
nity and courtliness. They are dangerously 



128 AIMS OF TEACHING 

near to sham, because they win applause 
easily. Personal dignity goes with a real ideal, 
and the true gentleman addresses himself to 
genuine and not to make-believe obligations. 

IDEALISM AND AMBITION. 

There is a difference, of course, between ideal- 
ism and ambition. The one may be mere day 
dreaming, the other implies actual effort. The 
one has no definite aim and takes up nothing 
with certain grasp; the other, though it may 
lack circumspection, is sure and vigorous. 
The boy wants to become somebody big, and 
he does not count the cost. He talks grandil- 
oquently and loves to pose, but it would be a 
grave wrong to ridicule him. His vagueness 
will some day be replaced by clearer vision, and 
the boy may make his boast good. This at 
least is achieved by idealism, that it helps the 
boy to ascertain his limitations and also attain 
to efficiency. It is a form of self-discipline. He 
soon realizes that wishing does not bring things, 
that he must have a provable claim if his de- 
mand is to be heeded. 

RELIGION AND MORALITY. 

This evolution of childhood into manhood is 
a struggle after moral self-mastery, and it is 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 129 

also the rise of the rehgious feeHngs. Up to this 
period the rehgious sentiments were rudimen- 
tary and the child cannot be said to have any 
precise religious notions and not much more 
than a vague sense of God. Child Religion 
seems to comprise up to this time the certainty 
that God is in the world, and that we had better 
mind Him. But what "minding" God demands 
and what results come from it are conceived 
within the range of morality rather than of reli- 
gion, a limitation beyond which many adults 
seem unable to advance. Morality and reli- 
gion were fused into one another, and the first 
step forward now is toward a separation of the 
two. This is possible because personality is be- 
ing developed. The child is beginning to feel 
that he is becoming responsible. There is only 
one step from responsibility toward others to 
responsibility toward oneself. Out of this sense 
of personal obligation is born the most im- 
portant force of religion. The teacher would 
do well to bend down with sympathy to these 
awakenings of the child-faith. 

SOCIAL INTERPRETATION. 

The educational work of this period is to pro- 
ject the interest out of the self upon others. 
The aim of the teacher is to open up avenues 



130 AIMS OF TEACHING 

of moral approach for the child that he may 
enter the lives of others by sympathetic service, 
not for the sake of the ultimate good which may 
accrue either to the recipient or the doer, but, 
without regard to results, as a widening of his 
interests. The youth should realize that his 
conduct bears upon himself as much as upon 
the lives of others, that what he does either 
knits or cuts the threads of connection between 
himself and others, and that the maintenance 
or the disturbance of his social relations 
enriches or impoverishes him. 

For the purpose of this training Charity, 
for example, may be regarded as an entrance 
into the lives of others and doing for them 
what they cannot do for themselves; but, in 
the first instance, it is an ennoblement of the 
self; love reacts and makes lovable. 

The boy of this age wants to do things, for 
by activity he becomes aware of what he is. 
For the right development of his character 
much depends upon what he is encouraged to 
realize within himself. 

For this there are innumerable occasions, in 
the home and in the school and in the relations 
between them. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 131 

VIRTUE AND VICE. 

For the first time in the child's school career 
the terms virtue and vice acquire definite 
meaning. A virtue is a manner of living which 
aids to get one's manliness or womanliness 
recognized, while vice prevents one from being 
respected. It will not do to appeal for good 
conduct now on the score of the sense of right, 
the conscience and similar abstract motives. 
Virtue is observed and vice rejected, not be- 
cause their moral meaning is grasped, but 
because virtue is an advantage and vice a 
hindrance. 

This is the age of vanities, and virtue is 
merely an excellence which helps to attract 
notice. There are cases, in fact, when wrongs 
are done just because they are sensational. It 
must be remembered that this is the age of 
growing individualism, in which the self aims 
to assert itself. Much of the crime which 
youth commits at this age has its source in 
braggadocio. This individuality is crude, but 
it is the first expression of self-consciousness. 
It should not be condemned outright, for the 
bid for attention is natural and the fault does 
not lie in the making of the claim so much as 
in the means by which the claim is set forth. 
It is not the bov's fault that faults almost force 



132 AIMS OF TEACHING 

him to be theatrical, nor that he does not know 
the difference between people's attention and 
people's approval. 

MORAL JUDGMENT. 

This involves an essential phase of moral 
development. The boy must learn to look for 
the standard of right and wrong, not in what 
others endorse or reprove, but in himself and 
in his own moral discrimination. It is fort- 
unate that he is self-conscious and eager to 
count for something. For that is the pivotal 
point of character. In matters of right and 
wrong, approval and disapproval are within 
one's self. Others do not know our motive, 
but we do. And it is the motive that makes 
an act right or wrong. No outsider can know 
what is going on in us. No outsider can tell, 
as we ourselves can, whether what we do we 
mean honorably or not. When we do right 
we do not require anybody's approval, nor can 
any one relieve us of the disapproval which we 
set on the act ourselves. This is not the 
enthronement of conscience, but the establish- 
ment of an inner moral judgment. The direct- 
ing conscience is a still farther step forward, 
but this moral insight is on the road toward it. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 133 

GOD A MORAL FACT. 

A similar shift of center within the growing 
personality may be noticed in the boy's relig- 
ious life. As the authority in morals becomes 
more intangible and independent of circum- 
stances, so also the spiritual sense begins to 
dawn and the world and nature are more than 
merely mechanical things. The power of God 
ceases to be merely physical, and He becomes 
a moral authority. Along with the growth of 
the child-personality grows also the God-per- 
sonality. Now He is a Moral Fact. God does 
not do things simply because He knows how 
better than any man, but because He considers 
them right. God does not do wrong, because 
wrong cannot possibly come from Him. The 
God-fact develops in the child just as his own 
ego develops. God is not any longer outside. 
He begins to be inside of the life. God ceases 
to be spectacular, as it were, a Great Being in 
the Heavens, whose approval we try to obtain 
and whose disapproval we strive by all means 
to avoid. God is the spirit within us, and we 
feel we have His approval when we are calm in 
mind, and we know He disapproves when we 
feel ill at ease. 



134 AIMS OF TEACHING 

WORSHIP AND MORAL EMULATION. 

Worship is still an affair of the individual. 
It does not consist in prayer and petition. 
Prayer is the expression of admiration of the 
Great Personality which is altogether right and 
never wrong, and a desire or aspiration to be 
with Him and not alien to Him. The prayers at 
this age should be mediations rather than ad- 
dresses to God; though the meditation should 
culminate in admiration and the prayer 
to God in an appeal to the best in oneself. 
Worship should emphasize not the defects 
and the deficiencies man has (or the child) but 
the satisfaction he has from right conduct and 
moral achievements. Youth should learn to 
consider as worship those happy moments when 
he is at his best. To be sure, I mean by hap- 
piness not the feeling of satiety, when we have 
gotten what we have craved for, but that ela- 
tion and satisfaction which attend our moral 
activities. Youth feels happy when it can do 
things well, and we should evoke this moral 
spiritedness and infuse it with exhilaration. 

An hour of youthful worship should be an 
hour of spiritualization, and the boys and 
girls should return from it to their homes and 
to their duties with a finer moral acumen and 
purpose. It must also be remembered that 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 135 

children must learn not merely how and why to 
worship, but also what for. The average child 
is not clear on the subject, nor is the average 
adult. But the teacher should know that wor- 
ship is not an intuitve faculty which children 
have by instinct, but that they must be 
taught worship and that there are progressive 
steps in this as in every other subject. The next 
step, after individual and personal worship, is 
toward congregational worship, when the ado- 
lescent begins to appreciate that his life touches 
other lives and that he is under the law of man 
and the Law of God. 

CO-ORDI NATION. 

Since the pupil at this epoch is absorbed with 
himself (which is by no means selfishness justly 
stigmatized and denonunced later) and preoc- 
cupied with raising his personal capacities to 
the highest power, the approach to and co-or- 
dination with others is his moral problem. This 
age does not lack the sense of organization ; it 
recognizes that law is sovereign, but it lays em- 
phasis on self, and this makes the personal 
claims seem very big and more insistent than 
the demands of an outside authority. The 
danger is that the boy and the girl may settle 
down into conceits and self-satisfactions which 



136 AIMS OF TEACHING 

make moral advance difficult. They make the 
skeptic and the inveterate dissenter, who sees 
only his own questions and hears only his own 
answers. Objections become a luxury, as does 
the standing out against others. 

INTEREST OUTSIDE OF SELF. 

Unbelievers and disbelievers are made, not 
born, and it is very likely that the youthful 
delight in seeing oneself the center of discus- 
sion and argumentation may whet the appetite 
and make contrariness habitual and chronic. 
The treatment amounts to this : Draw the in- 
terest away from the self and make the world 
outside interesting; show that other persons 
and other lives bear upon our own, that the 
personal life is, after all, only a fragment and 
insufficient without others ; and finally, show 
that human life is impotent unless it can count 
on the God-presence in the world. By the pres- 
ence of God, however, is not meant a mere ar- 
ticle of faith that God is and that He is every- 
where (theological notions about God), but 
that God is active in this world, and that 
wherever the boy has work in hand and what- 
ever that work be he can do it rightly and well 
only when he realizes that the very material in 
his hand he himself cannot devise nor create, 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 137 

but that God makes it for him. This gives him 
caution and respect, quickens the reUgious 
sense and makes him alert to see, to feel and to 
be with God everywhere. This is the step from 
belief in God to co-operation with Him, from 
mere religious opinion to the active religious 
life. 

HERO WORSHIP. 

Hero worship is the moral grace of this 
period and it is also its religion. God is simply 
a Divine Hero, even for Jewish children. 
There need be no fear of idolatry in this. On 
the contrary, this makes religiousness truly per- 
sonal ; it sustains imagination and gives admi- 
ration and zest to emulate ideal types of life. 
The world is a theater of great deeds and history 
is a splendid drama. Every one has a role and 
those are best who acquit themselves best. The 
question is what one does and that one does that 
well. And the standard is God Himself. He 
does the incomparable. What He does no man 
can do. He is the power above all powers. He 
is the artist who beautifies the world and 
makes it admirable and lovable. And He is 
the Wisdom beyond all human wisdom. 

Hence, youth loves the- open life and delights 
in forest, field and brook. Never is the interest 



138 AIMS OF TEACHING 

in nature so genuine as now. But it is a living 
interest; not a scientific but a moral interest. 
Every instinct of the youthful person tingles 
with life and he hails them as coming out of 
the hand of the Great Life. 

GOD. 

The foundation of the God conviction is thus 
laid. In later years theological instruction will 
imperil this God reality by making belief a 
speculation. 

Now youth sees God with the eye of admira- 
tion and feels God with the heart of enthu- 
siasm. The conviction that God is, is a vital 
pulse in the religious life; it is not mere 
opinion. At no time in the later years can ar- 
gument and catechism produce conviction like 
this. The "proof" adults have may enlighten, 
but it cannot warm them. Unless youth is free 
to idealize God, later instruction will not fill 
the void nor bridge over the aloofness from 
which adult-religion so frequently suffers. The 
teacher should stir his pupils with admirations 
in all directions and encourage them to in- 
dulge in the naive ecstasies which are the 
healthy exercise of the soul in moral activity. 
The very fossil they stumble on in the ground 
is an occasion for seeing God and feeling He 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 139 

is near. Great men represent Him; they 
come from and reach up to Him. The rise and 
fall of nations, the tragedies of men and the 
varied experiences the children themselves have 
have moral meaning. God Himself, who is in 
all of them, is the highest Morality, the One 
who sets His face toward the Right. Not be- 
cause He makes the right prevail, but because 
He himself is the Right and the True and Good. 
All the youth's studies are saturated with God- 
presences; history is filled with magnificent 
heroisms, nature with divine activities, and 
literature tells exquisitely what lies in his im- 
pulsive soul. 

TYPES FOR HERO V^ORSHIP. 

There is need for caution. It is difficult to 
differentiate between the genuine and the 
spurious as to heroes. In the first place, even 
adults often fail to discriminate. In the 
second place, show is much more obtrusive 
than intrinsic worth, and young people are 
easily captivated by appearances. The dif- 
ficulty is met not by arousing suspicion, but by 
giving abundant examples of men and women 
who ring true. 

The teacher must be cautious in his selection 
of types. And the parent, too, must protect 



140 AliMS OF TEACHING 

the boy against impostors. The theater with its 
stagy heroes may do incalculable damage. 
Even the teacher himself has a serious responsi- 
bility here. For boys and girls imitate him, 
down to his foibles. They want to be like 
their teacher in every detail. Not only in his 
moral tone is the teacher representative of 
every virtue, but in the God-ideal which he sets 
up. His interpretations of God become the 
boy's interpretations, and what the teacher 
declares as God's justice and God's law and 
men's faith enters into the boy's ways of think- 
ing and feeling, and so the teacher becomes, as 
it were, the moral parent. What the teacher 
is, will go into the boy's being and stay there. 

THE TEACHER IS THE PROTOTYPE. 

The high regard in which the teacher has 
been held by the Jewish people is a tribute 
not only to scholarship but also to character, 
and it is devoutly to be wished that this may 
so continue amongst us. A genuine character 
will readily find the avenue of approach 
to another soul. And he will also have tact, 
because he has sympathy. He will not ingra- 
tiate nor insinuate, and he will look for the 
right rather than for the wrong in others, in 
the world, in God. He will also strike a positive 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 141 

tone, being sure of himself and of his faith. 
What youth needs now is rehance upon self. 
That can be gotten only after there is trust in 
others. Faith in the world, in fellowmen, in 
God goes before confidence in self. There is a 
kind of sureness which seems to be first in the 
moral development, but that sureness is coarse 
and cannot grow. There is a later kind of cer- 
tainty which is better and truer. We admire in 
order to copy. We accept as authority in order 
to obey. We trust that we may become 
trustworthy. We worship God, that is, we 
edify ourselves and build up our soul life, so 
that we may be sound and strong. The positive, 
consistent and manly teacher is in himself the 
best text-book and catechism. He can con- 
vince only when he is a moral influence. The 
Jewish teacher of today must become a living 
factor in Jewish child-life, and it is evident he 
has abundant opportunities in this Grade. 

THE TALMUDIC LIFE. 

The material for this Grade is the life of the 
Jews as represented by the Talmud. The Jew 
maintains himself by his moral force, unaided 
by government and institutions. He has a 
moral center within himself. It is a period 
which we might call crucial in the history of 



142 AIMS OF TEACHING 

the Jewish people. It develops a new rehgious 
consciousness (more insistent than even the 
former national) and a capacity for conform- 
ing to the world-environment. Tradition 
which heretofore was in the keeping of the few 
is now the possession, the influence in the life 
of every person. The self, which formerly had 
the protection of institutions, is now thrown 
upon its own inner resources. Compliance with 
Law is now not a sacrament but a moral fact. 
And religion begins to free itself from the en- 
tanglements of priestly law on the one hand 
and custom on the other. The world becomes 
significant, for the Jew lives in it and must 
know and use it. And the world, too, begins to 
be interested in the Jew, not merely as a dis- 
senter but as a contributor to its large civiliza- 
tion. And each Jew is sponsor for all Jews. 
His aloofness, though living in the midst of 
men, is for moral reasons. He develops a rec- 
ognizable individuality in all directions. Even 
the organization of his people lacks cohesion; 
in fact, it is only moral and voluntary. The 
problem of the school is to make solidarity 
among the youths possible with a minimum of 
control, and to base it entirely upon sound and 
well-trained instincts. Talmudic casuistry is 
merely intense scrupulousness ; at any rate, it is 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 143 

valuable from the point of view of what it has 
done for the conscience of the Jew. There are 
now no theoretical speculations. God is an 
actuality, not an abstraction. There was no 
metaphysics in the Talmudic times and very 
little mysticism. Religion was altogether 
a matter of conduct and this conduct, while 
minutely prescribed, was asociated with per- 
sonal obligations and responsibility. And the 
Rabbis, as well as the people, are types of char- 
acter. From the point of view of the educator, 
and perhaps also of the historian and of the 
impartial judge, the Talmudic Rabbis are not ., 
significant for what they said and taught so 
much as for what they were and did. Herein 
lies their title to an assured place in the School 
and in the Jewish Home. Some of them were 
martyrs, but all of the were moral heroes, types 
of high and truthful living. It is a grateful task 
to restore these men of stamina to the admira- 
tion they deserve and to the emulation which 
they may still elicit. 

BIOGRAPHY. 

The method of presentation of this material 
is biographical. For the interest to which ap- 



144 AIMS OF TEACHING 

peal is made is personal, and the moral need 
of the child is to develop personality. This does 
not mean that the biographies be detached 
from one another and that they should not fol- 
low an historic sequence. There must be a 
logical connection between the hero-tales, if 
for no other reason than to widen the child's 
mental horizon and to prepare it for history as 
such. But even without this consideration 
the individual stories will gain educational 
force when it is felt that the)^ constitute a neces- 
sary squence, that one grows out from the 
other. 

But, in the main, each biography should be 
complete in itself. For the child must get a 
survey over a career, and to realize that it con- 
stitutes a moral unit ; that every act tells upon 
the whole of life and moral responsibility 
enters into every detail of conduct. One mis- 
take unmakes a career and one fine act may 
recoup it. 

THE HISTORIC VIEW. 

It is a mistake to force on the child the larger 
outlook we call Providence. The child is in- 
capable of life philosophy or world philosophy, 
and if it is taught God in such a form its con- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 145 

ception will become vague and confused- God 
is not truer because the canvas on which He is 
shown is large, but He is more real when His 
presence is perceived within one's own life. The 
study of history as a field of large moral ac- 
tions of God and men is very impressive, but 
it demands a trained intellect and imagination, 
and these the child does not have. The com- 
paratively small story of one man's life in- 
volves the same Moral Law which plays in 
history and is nearer to the eye and the heart. 
The child gets from biography all the moral 
benefit it needs and can hold. There will be 
plenty of time later on to widen the intellectual 
horizon of the child as to the providential acts 
of God, to show it that its individual life is only 
a part of humanity and that law means not 
merely what man must do, but also what 
God works out. It will be best for the child's 
ethical clearness if we exercise it on the 
play of right and wrong within the narrower 
field of its own little experience and in the pro- 
totypes (the heroes) vv^hom it emulates. The 
error in Jewish education has been that we 
have given the children too much abstraction 
and not enough of the concrete. This error is 
less pardonable in view of the fact that we are 



146 AIMS OF TEACHING 

so rich in fine biographies. But we must not 
continue to make this mistake today, when 
hfe calls for action and strong souls. 

INSTRUCTION AND LIFE. 

The one insurmountable difficulty of the 
Religious School is the fact that it is limited to 
mere talk about virtue, God, life, that it is 
without means to make activity its form of in- 
struction, that what it teaches is merely ad- 
visory, that it has no oportunity for moral 
exercise and that the religious truths remain ab- 
stractions. The place for applying, for exercis- 
ing, for verifying Religious School lessons is in 
the human give and take, in the contact of men, 
in the communion of the home, and in the rub 
and conflict of society. Religious instruction 
is doomed, it seems, to be nothing more 
than book knowledge and school-room beati- 
tude. This is to be deplored all along the line 
of our work, but most especially at the age when 
children thrill with a passion for doing things. 
The pasive and contemplative character of our 
religious teaching is little likely to appeal to 
active, vigorous and impulsive children and 
youth. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 147 

ACTIVITIES. 

To compensate justly for this, it would be 
good to supplement school-room instruction 
with such activities as are open to the young. 
The organization of boys' clubs and girls' clubs 
might bring out leaders whom to admire and to 
follow would be salutary moral exercise. It 
might help in self-expression, which is a moral 
effort. It will afford occasions for co-operation 
which calls for self-control and mutual regard. 
It may initiate ambitiousness, which comes 
with the rounding out of personality. And 
last, but not least, it may help to cultivate soli- 
darity in Jewish youths, that sense of kinship 
which is so essential to the Jewish people and 
so imperiled under modern conditions. Per- 
haps the experiment of self-government clubs 
in this Grade would produce happy results in 
some of these directions. The teacher must re- 
member, however, that in these clubs he does 
not deal with a "society" whose members have 
social sense, but with individual boys or girls 
who are morally aloof from one another. The 
problem is to break through this reserve and to 
cement these young people in a common 
interest and common cause. Opportunity for 
social drill can be found in plays which the 



148 AIMS OF TEACHING 

class may agree to enact. The rehearsals are 
valuable for that and so is the working together 
for the same purpose (to bring honor to the 
class or to please an assembled school, or to 
raise its reputation in the judgment of the 
parents and the public.) For that matter, the 
discipline of the class, while together at its les- 
sons, makes for moral stamina, loyalty and 
mutuality. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 149 



THE RELATION BETWEEN THE 

PUBLIC SCHOOL AND THE 

RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. 

The Religious Schools should be conducted 
on the plan of the public schools, and super- 
intendents and teachers should familiarize 
themselves with the methods of teaching and 
discipline which obtain there. There are 
two reasons for this. In the first place, the 
child must have a uniform educational life. 
All the influences that go into its soul must 
be of the same kind. Much of the difficultv in 
the Religious School is traceable to the fact that 
the children find no connection between it and 
their public school life. It is not because other 
subjects are taught there, but because the tone, 
manner and management are different and 
often contradict what the children are accus- 
tomed to. And the second reason for making 
the Religious School parallel to the public school 
is the fact that it will aid the Religious School 
teacher. He will know what the pupil is learn- 



150 AIMS OF TEACHING 

ing, what his mental capacities are, what 
new information and what new intellectual 
training are coming to him. And the teacher 
will be able to adjust the religious education 
to that. Much of the religious teaching in the 
with the other parts of the child's education. It 
is the duty of the Religious School teacher to 
make himself conversant with the work his pu- 
pils are doing during the week, and it is his 
distinct duty to connect his religious instruction 
with the other instruction which enters the 
life of the child. But he cannot do it unless he 
knows what his pupil is receiving elsewhere. 
Every teacher should supply himself with a 
copy of the "Course of Study" of the local 
public schools and familiarize himself with it 
with the greatest care as to the respective work 
of his Grade all the year through. 

This alignment of the Religious School work 
with the public school work is necessary for 
another reason. Secular education needs the 
supplementation of the religious instruction. 
For the public school education is incomplete 
without it and does not and cannot furnish it. 
The Religious School, therefore, has a duty 
in that regard. Nor should the Religious 
school merely give information about reli- 
gion; it should follow the child's soul in its 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 151 

religious development, step by step. This will 
afford to the teacher an insight into child 
life and child religion, which cannot but en- 
lighten him. 

RELIGIOUS TRAINING A NECESSARY PART OF 
CHARACTER. 

Since religious training is essential to right 
character we must supply it, and since we can- 
not supply it in the public schools (and should 
not), we must give it in separate schools. But 
we must on that account not isolate religion 
from the rest of the formative influences which 
go into child life. Religion must be woven 
into the texture of the child soul if it is to be a 
quality of character, and we must avoid the 
danger to which the two-fold division of child- 
training is exposed under present conditions. 
We must not mislead the child to believe that 
religious education is something other than 
and totally different from general education 
and culture. We must disabuse the mind of 
parents of the notion that Religious schools are 
outside of child needs, merely because Religious 
school hours are outside of those of the public 
schools. And we must bring to the children 
the feeling that when they go to the Religious 
schools they go for the same purpose for which 



152 AIMS OF TEACHING 

they are sent during the week to the public 
schools. But we shall not bring this home 
either to parents or to the children unless we 
frankly and fully commit ourselves to the fact 
that public school education and Religious 
school education are of the same spirit and 
aim at the child character. 

Just as the public school addresses the whole 
child and fosters essential phases of its develop- 
ing life, so the Religious School has for its 
purpose to promote the growth of the child up 
to the highest and best of its powers. The 
public school addresses the mind, the hand and 
the eye; the religious school addresses the same 
capacities and raises them to a higher power. It 
addresses the mind, that it may see not only 
things but that which is beyond things; it 
appeals to the spirit and the heart to give it 
clarity and a finer sensitiveness ; and it asks for 
certain ways of conduct that the child may 
learn how to respond to the demands of 
experience. 

THE RELIGIOUS SCHOOL INTERPRETS LIFE. 

In the public school the child learns the facts 
of everyday life. In the Religious School he 
learns to interpret them, to see their meaning 
and to use them for high ends. Secular educa- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 153 

tion is incomplete without religion. Parents 
should be told of this, and children should be 
made to feel it. How.f* By the teachers first 
of all believing it themselves, and then going at 
it with positive conviction and with a trust in 
the fact that children will respond to true 
idealism. 

Most teachers of our Religious Schools talk to 
their pupils about Judaism and religion with 
unmistakable aloofness. That is in itself suf- 
ficient to chill the heart of pupils as much as 
it chills the heart of the subject. Feel an ideal 
and tell children of it and you will see wonders. 

PUTTING RELIGION INTO THE HANDS 
OF TEACHERS. 

The linking of the course of instruction in 
the Religious School with that of the public 
school will effect a salutary reaction upon the 
Religious School. Not only will it improve, as if 
by magic, the "discipline" of the Religious 
School, but it will give Religious School teach- 
ing a reality which it sadly lacks. It will 
bring religion near to the heart of children 
because it will bring religion to the level of 
child interests. Religion will be treated not as 
a theological abstraction, but as a practical 
interest. It will take religious education out of 



154 AIMS OF TEACHING 

the hands of theologians and put it into the 
hands of teachers, where it belongs. 

REALITY IN TEACHING. 

Every teacher of the Religious Schools should 
visit a public school, preferably the one where 
his pupils attend, once a week, to acquaint 
himself with its pedagogic spirit and the con- 
creteness of instruction. Teaching must be real 
if it is to be effective. Religious School teachers 
have the notion that they must be unctuous if 
they are to be impressive. But children despise 
cant and they will reject high-wrought reli- 
giousness as affectation and false. Children 
would not endure for one moment in the Public 
School the unnaturalness which is so often im- 
posed on them in the Religious School. 

There is nothing in religion that requires 
cant, affectation and abstruseness. In fact, 
real religion is hindered and destroyed by them. 
A public school teacher goes at his work with 
decision, with evident aim and with his heart 
full of sound feelings, and we have a right to 
demand the same of the man who teaches reli- 
gion ; in fact, more than a common right. I find 
one of the reasons why children do not take to 
Religious -school work is the fact that Religious 
School teachers do not suggest to them that 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 155 

genuineness after which the child heart hungers. 
Judaism must be taught sincerely, with open- 
heartedness and with frank directness, or it 
had better not be taught at all. We need not 
only sincere teachers, teachers who know w^hat 
obligation they have assumed, but also teachers 
who commit themselves to these obligations 
and go at the fulfilling of them as a definite and 
scrupulous business. 

And there is another benefit that will come 
from joining hands with the public schools. 
It will open the eyes of the Religious School 
teacher to the fact that his work is not mere 
solemn preaching, but that it is actual teaching. 
Hollow preaching has damaged the usefulness 
of the religious schools. There has been too 
much pious talk and not enough real teaching ; 
too much story telling and moralizing and 
vacuous praying and hymn-droning, and not 
enough of training and building. Teachers 
think they make pupils honest by telling about 
an honest boy, or that they inculcate respect for 
parents when they give out the lesson (to be 
learned by heart) "Honor thy father and thy 
mother." As if qualities of the soul were born 
by the recital of words. Character is not 
born. It is trained by utmost patience and care- 
fully thought-out method. A virtue cannot be 



156 AIMS OF TEACHING 

made to arise in the child soul by any other 
method than that of training. Beliefs and con- 
victions will never rise in the child soul through 
memory gems, Biblical quotations and par- 
agraphs out of a catechism. 

NATURAL UNFOLDING. 

The teacher will have to make clear to him- 
self what virtues his children are capable of, 
what doctrinal truths they are mature enough 
to see, grasp and hold, and he must content 
himself with a little religious advance that is 
real and sound and spare his children the 
doubtful privilege of knowing "by heart" texts 
and words that do not stick. The school tra- 
dition which loads children with useless text 
book learning must come to an end. It has 
come to an end in the public school education, 
and we must put it out of our religious schools. 
Children go to school to develop all around, 
and whatever is done for them, with them and 
by them is to aid them to flower forth as nature 
and family history and family life and God 
enable them — in religion as in every other soul 
capacity. And it is the business, the holy busi- 
ness, of the teacher to afford this child nature 
all the opportunities it needs. The teacher's 
business is not to stuff the child with knowledge 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 157 

but to give it a free road for natural unfolding. 
God and nature can do (and do) infinitely 
more for the child than you and I. The 
public school is nowadays, under the guidance 
of modern pedagogy, on the side of the child 
and gives it freedom to grow. It does not 
stuff the child with information, but sees to it 
that the child's interests may go in the right 
direction. And the teacher of religion should 
learn to achieve this also, to awaken in the 
child religious interests, moral interests, in- 
terests in high causes. The Jewish teacher who 
stirs interests in Jewish ideals has achieved the 
best that is possible. But these interests must 
be within the reach of childhood. 



158 AIMS OF TEACHING 

THE TEACHER AND THE COM- 
MUNITY. 

The Jewish teacher must be interested in all 
the affairs of his community and the Jewish 
people at large. He should be a member of 
a Jewish household and family and should take 
part in some essential communal activity of a 
Jewish character. A teacher who limits himself 
to the perfunctory work of his school hours, and 
who does not think of his duty as such during 
the intervals between the sessions, cannot bring 
to his work the intensity and genuineness 
which are the fundamental conditions of his 
profession. Only a large-hearted interest will 
elicit the respect he claims from his pupils. I 
will not humiliate the noble profession of 
teaching by stating baldly that the teacher of a 
Jewish religious school should not expose him- 
self to criticism by his pupils for being 
persistently absent from worship and being 
an outsider to Jewish affairs, which the 
pupils hear discussed in their homes with 
feeling and earnestness. This is a matter of 
course. But when I demand from the teacher 
that he give to his pupils his sincere conception 
of the facts of Jewish life essential for 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 159 

Jewish character, I mean to urge upon him 
that he cultivate these by active participation 
in the communal activities and by observing 
an honest consistency in his personal conduct. 
The Jewish sense of life is not an inborn gift. 
It requires prolonged spiritual communion for 
its cultivation. And since the teacher should 
communicate the Jewish sense of virtue, free 
from every subtle selfish taint, he must strive 
for it with persistent aim and sincere effort. 
Nothing weakens more the prestige and, in fact, 
the value of the teacher than the suspicion of 
his pupils that he is aloof from the things their 
parents are interested in and the Jewish com- 
munity stands for. If, on the one hand, he is to 
have any sort of standing, other than the con- 
ventional one children yield in their general 
school discipline, and his instruction is to have 
the respect of his pupils, and if, on the other 
hand, he is to exert a right influence on them 
and give to his teaching that breadth and 
depth which religious teaching ought to have, 
the teacher must identify himself with public 
causes and fill his soul with real public-spirited 
^eal. Even if he teaches but one hour a week, 
he should be genuine in that one hour, or other- 
wise he misrepresents and harms the cause and 
his teaching becomes futile if not injurious. 



160 AIMS OF TEACHING 



STORYTELLING. 

Why do the stories of the Bible occupy the 
field of religious education? 

What do teachers expect from them and what 
constitutes their pedagogical value? 

These questions are fundamental; but they 
are never put, because we regard it as a matter 
of course that the Bible should be central in 
every phase of the subject of religion and 
Judaism. 

But it is not self-evident that the biblical 
stories are the inevitable means for the train- 
ing of child-character, and we have a right to 
ask by what authority other than that of the- 
' ology do they hold their place in the course 
of study of the Religious School. 

THE STORY IS TOLD FOR THE SAKE OF 
TRAINING. 

Teachers differ widely as to what they aim 
for, when they tell the stories of the Bible. 
Some tell them just for the sake of telling them. 
They believe these stories, when prettily told, 
contain lessons which are good and helpful and 
they are certain that somehow some benefit will 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 161 

go into the child-life. Just what goes into the 
child-soul is not clear to them, nor do they 
trouble themselves about that. Each story has 
a "moral" and that suffices. What the moral 
implicit in these stories is, depends upon 
the insight of the teacher and upon his in- 
genuity to "make it out." There is only one 
condition for this ingenuity. The implied lesson 
must be religious, and in the case of Jewish 
Religious School work it must be "Jewish." 
Despite this limitation there is ample latitude 
for the teacher's originality and invention. In 
fact, the current method is altogether invention 
and feeling one's way. There is no other 
guide nor criterion except the teacher's 
tact and the teacher's way of seeing some- 
thing in the story which, according to his no- 
tion, will benefit the child. One story after an- 
other is told and each of the stories serves 
for something indefinitely good, edifying and 
moralizing ; there is no plan in the work and no 
plan seems possible. 

Moral growth, the development of the child 
from simple moral notions and simple moral 
feelings to moral habits and large moral 
viewpoints, applies everywhere, it is conceded ; 
but no one seems to know how to apply this 
to story telling. The lessons are concrete and 



162 AIMS OF TEACHING 

disjointed, and they would be haphazard if it 
were not that the sequence of the Bible enforces 
a sort of continuity. But this continuity is 
historical rather than educational, and the 
teacher has in his mind rather how Judaism 
got to be than how the child is to become 
Jewish. 

THE ART OF STORY TELLING. 

Story telling is a difficult art, and one of the 
oldest and most dignified. And, as in the case 
of all the great arts, everybody tries his hand at 
it. But great story tellers, like all artists, are 
born and not made. Story telling is an art 
teachers must acquire, for it constitutes 
nine-tenths of their power. Children love a 
good story-teller, and nothing offends them 
more than to hear a good story poorly told. It 
it not at all unlikely that some of the failure of 
the average Religious School is due to the lack 
of the cultivation of this art. Surely some of 
the inattentiveness of the pupils can be traced 
to the fact that the teacher does not seize nor 
hold their interest. Children have an al- 
most insatiable hunger for stories and he 
must be dull, indeed, to whom they will not 
listen. The teacher should prepare not only 
the material of his Biblical Story, but also the 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 163 

very form into which he proposes to put it. 
The first rule of this art, so far as the Religious 
School is concerned, is that the narrator stick 
to the text as much as he possibly can. The 
biblical writers were wonderful story tellers, 
and none of us can improve on them. The 
Story of Esther, for instance, simple as it 
seems, cannot be told well otherwise than as 
the Book of Esther tells it. Independent and 
ingenious people have tried to tell it in their 
way, but every departure from the order and 
the setting of the incidents turns out to be a 
mutilation. Even the moral of the story is ob- 
scured and lost when the story is not given 
with the sequence of the original version. 

THE LAV^S OF THE ART OF STORY TELLING. 

Religious School teachers cannot raise their 
efficiency better than by sedulously practicing 
the art of story telling. The story must have a 
moral point ; or rather the development of the 
story must work obviously toward a human 
need, a human truth, a human experience. 
That moral must be implicitly in the story. It 
should deal not with abstract law, but with a 
fact of common life, such as the children will 
meet with, it may be at the very door of the 
school, in their families, or at their play. The 



164 AIMS OF TEACHING 

story teller faces his hearers and he should hear 
their heart-throbs. 

The second law of story-telling is this: 
The story must be told in well-ordered man- 
ner. There must be organization of the 
facts. What is mere setting must not crowd 
out what is essential, and what is essential 
must not obtrude in the guise of pompous 
cant. The teacher should not say: "Now, 
I am going to tell a story that shows that you 
must be good." Nor it it a wise practice to an- 
nounce to the children that the story that is 
about to be told, for instance, refers to a nice 
mountain, when what the teacher intends to 
do is to impress the Ten Commandments. 
Such an inversion of values will puzzle the 
pupils and put the lesson into confusion. 

The very introduction must be suggestive of 
seriousness and of proper proportions. The 
progress of the story from situation to situation 
should be logical and psychological. It should 
be reasonable and it should be in accordance 
with what the children themselves feel under 
the given circumstances. Even fairy tales must 
be "true" and dare not violate common sense. 
Extravagances are rejected by children as 
readily as they are rejected by adults, for they 
prove nothing, convince nobody and, if they do 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 165 

not bewilder the listener they certainly confuse 
the lesson along with the facts. 

The third law of story telling involves the 
very core of the art. The story teller has 
the notion that his recital must be dramatic, 
and in a general way that is true ; only every- 
thing depends on what is meant by the dra- 
matic. We must certainly differentiate between 
what is dramatic for adults and what is dra- 
matic for children. To the child the dramatic 
story is not one of intricate plot. The plot must 
be simple, direct and obvious. 

THE TRAGIC. 

The tragic for the child is an incident of 
life which brings out a true act of God. 
Child-drama deals with every-day questions 
and every-day solutions of life. It becomes 
intense only because it is felt to be real, because 
the child is genuinely concerned in it, just as if 
his own life and his own interests and his own 
ambitions were at stake. The dramatic, the 
truly dramatic, is warm with the passion of life. 
Many a teacher could spare himself much un- 
necessary labor and effort to give ingenious 
turns to his story. In fact "turns" and such are 
dangerous to childhood, for they establish the 
appetite for sensation. There is no literature 



166 AIMS OF TEACHING 

so full of the genuinely tragic as are the stories 
of the Bible, but they are neither petty nor 
sensational. In each biblical story man is 
shown to be in conflict or in alliance with the 
law of God and the law of God is shown to be 
dominant and good. 

THE SHORT-STORY. 

Another point in story telling is not to be 
ignored. Each story must be a complete whole. 
The old-fashioned serial form of narrative will 
not do in teaching. Each story is a lesson, 
that is : it is a unit of some truths one clear 
and well-directed influence which the child is 
to receive and incorporate into his life. This 
rule should be most scrupulously followed. 
The narrator, who is always more teacher than 
story teller, must construct his story with this 
aim well in mind. The details of the story must 
crystallize about this central aim. Every story 
in school work should be a short-story, and it 
would be helpful to teachers to study short- 
story-telling from the biblical masters of the 
art, at once the most modern and the most 
ancient. The story is the oldest material in the 
history of teaching and has the approval of all 
teachers by the experience of all races. The 
wisdom of ages transmutes itself into "stories." 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 167 

The Arabian Night's Entertainments are a 
chain of short-stories, the Fables of ^sop are 
exquisite bits of short-story literature, and 
every one of the biblical stories is a short-story. 

A STORY SHOULD PORTRAY A DEFINITE 
EXPERIENCE. 

It may be remarked here that the short-story 
form is recommended not merely because it is 
compact and more easily held by the children, 
nor because this congested form of teaching is 
more likely to be in the grasp of the teacher, nor 
finally because the succinctness aids in lodging 
the lesson though these several reasons are 
very respectable and fundamental in teaching, 
but because every lesson hour should stand out 
in the child's school experience in a definite 
way. It is not only the teacher who should 
have a clear conception and clear realization of 
the work, but also the pupil. And, in fact, the 
pupil will not be benefited by the teacher un- 
less the lesson stands out with graphic preci- 
sion. Nothing helps in that more than the 
story told with lucidity and with directness, so 
that the pupil cannot be in doubt and cannot 
escape its appeal. A conscientious teacher, 
therefore, will not content himself with merely 
"looking up" his work, but he will determine 



168 AIMS OF TEACHING 

the purpose for which and the manner how he 
will tell it, he will employ his story even 
to the least detail. He cannot devote too 
much thought and preparation to that phase of 
his work. When the art of story-telling is once 
acquired, it is a most gratifying part of the 
teacher's life. 

THE STORY IS MERELY A PEDAGOGIC HELP. 

All this that has been said about the story 
and its place in education is not meant to 
encourage Religious School teachers to treat 
the biblical story as story. The story is only a 
means and should not be regarded in any 
other way than as a tool for teaching. Religious 
School teachers seem to think they exhaust 
their duty by the child when they tell the 
biblical stories, this and nothing more. Fond 
parents, too, take pride in telling the teacher, 
when they bring their child to the Religious 
School for the first time, that it knows the 
stories already. Some teachers are even embar- 
rassed by this parental anticipation of their 
work, and declare they do not know what more 
they could do for such children who know all 
about Adam and Eve before they have entered 
the class room. But these teachers, as well as 
these vain parents, should be told that it is their 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 169 

duty to put meaning into the story, and that in 
interpretation of the life these stories report 
Hes work iine enough for the best of teachers. 

It is the business of the teacher to provide 
the educational content. Stories are illustra- 
tions, they point a truth, they are not them- 
selves the truth. They are means by which the 
teacher brings home the lesson, and they are 
nothing if they remain in the rough un- 
used, unapplied and undirected to an educa- 
tional aim. The story is an incident in the 
lesson hour, not its main content. Whenever 
the story sprawls over the lesson and is un- 
related to an educational purpose, it remains 
barren and might as well not have been 
told at all. The present generation does 
not know the Bible, nor the biblical stories, 
not because the stories are not told, nor 
because they are not told well, but because 
they are told without purpose, without proper 
pedagogic point. The stories we remember all 
our life are not the stories that have been told 
us in our childhood at random, as mere enter- 
tainment, but the stories to whose telling the 
reminiscence of some happy, or serious, or it 
may be some sacred, experience clings. It is 
not enough that there is a glint in the eye or 
sweetness in the voice of the teacher, or that 



170 AIMS OF TEACHING 

the story has been admired or can be retold cor- 
rectly and faithfully. A story makes a life-long 
impression, such as we wish the biblical stories 
to make, only when the child feels a profound 
something behind the words of the story. 
This something is the subtle content of the les- 
son and constitutes an influence. We do not 
teach religion by arguing about it, and we must 
not expect that matters of fact of history or 
literature or catechism change in the child-soul 
into piety by themselves. 

Teachers must realize that stories are gold, 
which gets real value only after it has been 
minted and has received the right stamp. 
Story telling is an art, but as in all art, excel- 
lence and power come from the undefinable per- 
sonal touch. The teacher must cultivate the 
personal side of the story telling art and feel his 
way with sympathetic hand into the soul of the 
child. He dare not expect that mere words will 
do what heart throbs and a feeling imagination 
alone can achieve. 

The biblical stories seem almost as if they 
were invented for the purpose of conveying 
religious spirit and religious feeling. But this 
precious capital is frittered away by many 
teachers, who trust too much to the stories 
themselves and expect some magic in them to 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 171 

accomplish what they, as instructors, should 
devise carefully with plan and purpose. An 
uncouth hand, plunging among roses, fills with 
falling petals and gets for its pains not much 
more than thorns. 

Each teacher must determine whether the 
story is oportune or not, and in accordance with 
his decision on that opportuneness and rele- 
vancy to the work in hand lies his call to tell 
or to postpone the telling of the story. Nothing 
is more likely to dull the edge of his work than 
playing the role of constant story teller. I do 
not know how much irreparable mischief has 
been done in our Religious School by the no- 
tion some teachers have that their constant 
business is to tell stories, and that children 
come to Religious School to be told stories. 



172 AIMS OF TEACHING 



. THE TEXT BOOK. 

Most of the interest in Religious Educa- 
tion centers about the text book. Everybody 
hopes that it will bring the Jewish Renaissance 
so devoutly wished. If only we can get the 
right text book we are saved, is the prevailing 
cry. But nobody has as yet told us what is 
meant by a text book, and what its place is in 
the Religious School, what things it should con- 
tain, what its construction should be, and a 
number of other matters v/hich should be clear- 
ly defined. Is the school book to serve the 
teacher, or the pupil .^ Is it to further the in- 
dividual work of the pupil, or the work of the 
class .^ Is it meant for home work or for use 
in the class room.^^ It is to supply information, 
in addition to the conventional stories for 
which the school hour offers no opportunity, 
or is it to give information as supplementary 
reading .f* Has the author or compiler of the 
school book in mind a sort of convenient en- 
cyclopedia for the teacher to whose rescue 
he wishes to come, or is he thinking of the 
child whom he wishes to interest.^ Does not 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 173 

the average text book, which is a mere compila- 
tion of the traditional material, make public 
confession, as it were, of the fact that the 
teacher is incompetent to tell the story 
aright? Or will the ideal text book, for which 
we are looking, have more confidence in the 
teacher? If it will have more confidence in 
his scholarship, or in his pedagogic ability and 
discretion, what will this saving text book of 
the future do for the teacher, and what will it 
do for the child ? 

FOR THE TEACHER. 

When we review the school books now in use, 
we notice that all of them imply distrust in the 
competence of the teacher, and frankly give him 
merely elementary information. They do not 
pretend to assist him in the practice of teach- 
ing, in the method how to present the matter, 
in professional aspects of the work. They are 
frequently so elementary that it is difficult for 
the teacher to hold the respect of his pupils be- 
fore whose eyes these "Helps" and "Sugges- 
tions" are spread on the same page with the 
children's lesson. Lamentable insufficiency 
and tactlessness have preoccupied the field of 
the Jewish text-book literature. 



174 AIMS OF TEACHING 

FOR THE CHILD. 

As for the text books offered to our children, 
they differ according to the subjects with which 
they deal. We have text books that give the 
Biblical History, text books of later Jewish 
History, and some text books called Catechisms 
that deal with belief. The text books on 
Biblical History attempt to give the well-known 
facts in puerile manner, often mistaking 
childishness for childlikeness ; they interpret 
Jewish history, and supply gratuitous apol- 
igetics for supposedly wrong science and doubt- 
ful morals, and attempt to justify Judaism over 
the heads of the children. And the catechisms 
sin against the law of pedagogy, for they deal 
with abstractions and their artificial form of 
"question and answer", and the quotations they 
give prevent and suppress spontaneous inquiry 
and thought. 

THE BIBLE. 

The text book on Biblical History is really 
a substitute for Bible reading and ought to be 
not much more than that, for no one can 
pretend to tell the stories better than the Bible 
tells them. The most classical story tellers in 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 175 

the history of the art of story telHng (which by 
the way has played a very important role in 
civilization) are the authors of the biblical 
records, and the best text book is, after all, the 
one which follows the original Bible text most 
faithfully. It is best to cling closely to the very 
phraseology of the Bible. Even the language of 
the text book should comport with the high 
character of its contents. 

THE STYLE. 

Some teachers and text-book makers attect 
a popular style of narrative as a bid for 
child-attention and child-interest, but the child 
is willing enough to listen to quaint language 
and is even charmed by it, and the unique 
biblical language is likely to impress him very 
profoundly. On the other hand, commonplace 
language disillusions the child and drags down 
the sacred ideal of religion and religiousness in- 
to familiarity that breeds contempt. The 
teacher must observe the happy medium be- 
tween the classic prototype he has in the biblical 
sources and the every-day life of the child, 
which he aims to refine and fill with a larger 
significance. 



176 AIMS OF TEACHING 

PEDAGOGIC AIM. 

Now, there are as many kinds of text books 
possible as there are pedagogic aims. One kind 
should give the facts for the teacher and an- 
other for the pupils. The teacher's should give 
the matter with due perspective as to history 
and with larger outlook as to what place the 
facts have in current life. The pupil's book 
should supply the facts from the point of 
view of the child-life for which they are meant, 
and of the bearings they have on the child's 
judgment, on his feelings, on his habits, on his 
intellectual, moral and religious development. 

TEXT BOOKS SHOULD NOT BE USED IN THE 
LESSON-HOUR. 

The teacher must leave his text book at home 
and stand before his class free as master 
of the situation. The children, too, must leave 
theirs at home; they should be free in the 
class room from the dead letter and be open to 
the influence of the personality of the teacher. 
With the book in his hand, the teacher is fet- 
tered to the letter, and the children also are 
unfree so long as their eyes must be on the 
page. Let the teacher prepare his lesson care- 
fully at home and he will have resourcefulness 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 177 

before his pupils. Hold him down to the book 
and all his freedom and his geniality and his 
personality are gone. And so also the pupil 
should study his lesson at home and be open 
to the influences of the school. The text book 
is often a hindrance to the work of both teacher 
and pupils. 

Another kind of text book may be designated 
as "Helps," one to help the teacher and another 
to help the pupil. But these "Helps" should be 
kept distinct and apart. What is an aid to the 
teacher cannot be offered to the child, and 
what is an aid to the child is totally different 
from the other. Teacher and pupil cannot 
learn out of the same book. The teacher needs 
the fullest information, the clearest suggestions 
as to what to teach, when to teach and how to 
teach. The pupil needs in his book clearness 
of presentation, sympathy, and a timely assist- 
ance toward growth. "Simple" language is 
not enough, nor is it enough to interest him. 
The child is willing, much more willing than 
superficial book makers are aware, to take his 
education seriously, and he does not care to be 
merely entertained. We have a telling instance 
of this in the failure of many a text 
book which the pupils rejected just because it 



178 AIMS OF TEACHING 

was so obviously a book of entertainment. The 
text book should be an aid, a book of sources, 
a reference book, to which the child can go 
for reliable information, and care should be 
taken that the information is full, certain, and 
given with authority. The work of the class 
room should arouse so much of vividness and 
eagerness in the child that he can carry his in- 
terest in the subject home with him, and it 
should induce him to "look up" for further in- 
formation what has been talked of and dis- 
cussed by himself and his teacher. 

THE PERSONAL W^ORK OF THE TEACHER. 

It is not right to help the teacher by 
getting ready for him what in all seriousness 
he ought to seek out for himself. Much of the 
so-called "Helps for Teachers" is an encour- 
agement to laziness and dullness. Only such 
text books as arouse personal effort and 
painstaking research are real helps. There is 
no reason in the world why the Religious School 
teacher should have everything he needs put at 
his very elbows. On the contrary, he should 
not be robbed of the zest which lies in 
working out the information himself. That he 
is not adequately prepared and does not know 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 179 

how to do it, is no justification. A teacher 
who cannot look for what he needs and cannot 
recognize it when he gets at it, should not un- 
dertake to teach. And the teacher who forgoes 
the delight of the discovery of the facts 
misses the real joy of his work; and if he 
is willing to be robbed of it, he dooms his work 
to failure by the low tone of his professional 
conscience. No one in the whole realm of the 
teaching profession has so much scope for 
personal expression and personal influence as 
the teacher in the Religious School. He should 
be the last to chain himself to a text book and 
to depend upon "helps" for facts, for thoughts, 
for guidance. Far from resting our religious 
revival upon text books, we ought to emanci- 
pate the teacher of our Religious Schools from 
the limitations of text-book knowledge and 
text-book directions. We must have free 
teachers, if we have any at all ; we must have 
teachers who can work without the artificial 
helps and prods and stilts. Those are teachers 
indeed, who know because they want to know, 
who teach with a genuine interest, who get the 
confidence and the admiration and evoke the 
emulation of their pupils not through the notes 
of a text book but by their intimate acquaint- 
ance with and love for childhood. 



180 AIMS OF TEACHING 

Teaching is not a trade; it is the noblest of 
all callings, one which demands the highest 
powers of soul. The teacher who is helpless 
without the text book is as unworthy of, as 
he is unfit for, the great trust reposed in him. 
At least one of the tests of fitness, one of the 
elementary tests, is how free of the text 
book the teacher can be. Whosoever is not 
free in this least of his duties is not free in the 
highest of them. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 181 



HEBREW. 

Hebrew is the characteristic subject of the 
curriculum of the Jewish Religious School, 
the other subjects, biblical history, ethics and 
religious principles, it shares with other de- 
nominational schools. Only Hebrew is an 
avowedly Jewish subject. When the Hebrew 
is dropped out of the religious training, the 
Jewish school loses much of its uniqueness. 
The Hebrew accentuates all the other subjects: 
of the school and gives them their Jewish 
"genius" and charm. Jewish heroism and 
Jewish martyrdom, Jewish poetry and Jewish 
philosophy, Jewis customs and Jewish ritual 
lose the largest part of their distinctiveness 
when they are taught without relation to that 
tongue which is the source of their life. 

It is not only Judaism that is hazarded by 
the ignoring of the Hebrew language and liter- 
ature, but the cultural good which it contains. 
So far, Hebrew has been assigned a place in the 
course of Religious School work largely for 
sentimental reasons, but its pedagogic content 
has not been thought of. 



182 AIMS OF TEACHING 

MORAL TRAINING. 

Even the technical drill in the rudiments of 
the language should aim at moral training ; the 
alphabet, the consonants and vowels call for 
keen watchfulness, and the very vocabulary is 
religious. We may teach Hebrew not only 
for the sake of absorbing the subtle Jewish 
spirit that lies in it, but also because the very 
letters, words and phrases call for concentra- 
tion, interest and respect. 

HEBREW^ SHOULD GIVE WHAT THE 
VERNACULAR DOES NOT. 

We may begin teaching Hebrew in the Third 
Grade, because at that period of child life the 
language instinct is alert and most responsive. 
Care, however, must be taken that the teaching 
of Hebrew aim at something other than the 
mere getting of additional names for objects 
which the child can already name in its own 
mother tongue. A new language is an educa- 
tional asset only when the child acquires words 
with new contents. The new vehicle should 
carry new goods. The child should get not 
merely new labels for old things, but new 
things and new feelings and new experiences. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 183 

THE JEWISH LIFE IS IN THE HEBREW 
LANGUAGE. 

And it will be found in this case, as in so many 
others, that as soon as we go at the matter 
directly, with our aim clearly in view, those 
worries which hindered us on the way are 
allayed of themselves. Hebrew will gain 
in interest for the pupils as soon as we do it 
pedagogic justice, and give it that place in 
Jewish education which it is entitled to have. 
Hebrew does not want more time in the hour 
plan, but more pedagogic appreciation on the 
part of the teacher. He should not any longer 
teach it as a mere Jewish orthodoxy, but as a 
subject that has classic religious and moral life 
in it. He should teach it, as all language and 
all literature are taught, for cultural influence. 
We have been troubling our children with the 
mechanical aspect and have not thought of, 
let alone urged, the moral and religious aspect 
of Hebrew word and text and the life embodied 

in them. 

« 

THE EDUCATIONAL CONTENT OF THE 
HEBREW LANGUAGE. 

The alphabet has stopped short most of 
the teachers in the Jewish Religious Schools 



184 AIMS OF TEACHING 

and they seem not to have gone much beyond 
it. The child has not been given the larger 
sense of the subject and has not been allowed 
to "enter the promised land." Do not blame 
the child for having gotten a distaste for He- 
brew. The bungling methods and half- 
heartedness on the one hand and the blind 
push and shove on the other are to blame. 
The teacher himself has lacked the pedagogic 
conception of the subject, and where there 
is no spirit there can be no good work. 
The very introduction of the Hebrew in the 
child's Religious School life has been unfor- 
tunate. The child is made to plod over 
technicalities of the Hebrew and scents no 
feeling with regard to it in either teacher 
or book. I cannot suppose that American 
Jewish children are so dull that the acquire- 
ment of the Hebrew alphabet should be such a 
hardship as the failure of Hebrew in the Relig- 
ious Schools all over this country implies. 
Nor will I concede that the teaching of Hebrew 
must forever be hopelessly dry and mechanical. 
Behind every subject must be the teacher and 
back of every lesson must be a deep sincerity. 
Good intent, a large view and a deep apprecia- 
tion will make the subject of Hebrew real and 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 185 

effective. The teachers must get a deeper in- 
sight into its educational meaning, and an 
honest belief in its vitality. It is the teacher 
who has been the skeptic and not the pupil. 
A.nd the reform must set in with the teacher. 

THE NEED OF THE CHILD THE CRITERION. 

Specious pleas, such as that the Hebrew lan- 
guage will die unless we rescue it, or that the 
Hebrew is a bond between Jews of all lands, 
have no force, in view of the confusion that 
prevails as to the exact position Hebrew has 
in the scheme of Jewish education. We are not 
called upon to rescue anything except the 
Jewish child, and as for an international bond 
between Jews of all lands, we must establish 
it by something morally positive and spiritual, 
and not by the phrases of the prayer book. At 
any rate, as teachers we must keep in view, 
not any eventual good outside of the school 
rooms, but the present need of the child before 
us. Only in so far as it helps train the present 
generation has a subject standing in the reli- 
gious school, as in every other school, and the 
real question before us is not whether adults 
feel themselves at home when they hear 
Hebrew in foreign synagogues, nor whether the 



186 AIMS OF TEACHING 

Hebrew is saved from oblivion, but whether 
it makes our children better and stronger 
and more real in their Jewish life. Instead of 
going around the issue on sentimentalities, we 
must face it frankly as an educational question. 
The call is so insistent for immediate influence 
upon the present Jewish child world, that we 
cannot afford to run after will-o'-the-wisps 
outside. 

THE HEBREW^ LANGUAGE IS THE VEHICLE 
OF JEW^ISH RELIGIOUSNESS. 

The Hebrew language has been and many 
desire that it should continue to be a part of 
the curriculum of the Jewish religious school. 
Why has it been taught, and what expectations 
from it do they have who urge it today? What 
do teachers plan to do for the child by means of 
the Hebrew.^ Why shall a Jewish school teach 
Hebrew as an essential for the equipment of 
the Jewish child for life.^ Remember that we 
are not educating the child in our Religious 
Schools for the synagogue nor for Judaism, but 
for his own destiny; we assume responsibility 
not as confessors but as teachers. The child 
is entrusted to us by the parents in order that 
we should fit it for life, that we should give 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 187 

to it the interests and the powers by which the 
child may Hve that Jewish Hfe which they 
beUeve is good for it to Hve. Hebrew is to con- 
stitute an influence by which Judaism is to be 
ingrained into the child character. We are 
justified in employing Hebrew for that educa- 
tional end, since we know that the genius of the 
Jewish life has gone into this language. What 
we are doing in the class room is merely taking 
out of the language what is in it, and giving 
that to the children that they may have and 
hold it. 

THE PEDAGOGIC AIM. 

The pedagogic place of Hebrew in Jewish 
religious schools should be definite. The 
Hebrew literature is the bearer of the Jewish 
tradition and life and it should be made 
available to every generation of the Jewish 
people. It is true beyond doubt that Jewish 
literature is the vehicle for not only the classic 
expression, but also for the vitalizing influences 
of the Jewish life. Nowhere else are Jewish 
thought, Jewish morality, Jewish faith and 
Jewish ideal so unalloyed and so definite and so 
forcefully put. As soon as this is acknowl- 



188 AIMS OF TEACHING 

edged, our duty to teach Jewish literature be- 
comes a matter of course. 

HEBREW IN THE CULTURE OF THE WORLD. 

The difficulty cannot lie in the admis- 
sion of this fact and principle, but only 
in the technical and didadic aspect of the 
matter. But most of the difficulty is brushed 
aside when we have a clear and definite 
educational aim. We teach Hebrew, not 
for the sake of Hebrew, but for the sake of 
the Jewish child. And we bring Hebrew to the 
Jewish child because we wish to foster the 
' Jewish feeling in the Jewish child, and this can- 
not be attained by any other subject of study 
so directly and effectively. The Hebrew lan- 
guage and the Hebrew literature are essential 
for Jewish education. Jewish literature is not 
dead literature, in the sense in which the classic 
literature of the Greeks and Romans is 
spoken of as dead. In a very real sense, in 
fact, even these may be said to be living more 
than any national language that has been 
derived from them; for they have as many 
lives as there are dialectic descendants of them, 
and they are either themselves the organs of 
great cultures or help voice the life of other 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 189 

and more recent cultures. By this standard 
the Hebrew is entitled to a place in the cur- 
riculum not only of a Religious School, but of 
every large-scoped institution in which the 
educational material is chosen by reason of 
vital content. No civilization has so permeated 
the civilization of our day as has the civiliza- 
tion of the Jewish people, and when we apply 
the moral and religious standard, which is 
the only one we may apply to educational 
subjects, Hebrew is the world language par 
excellence. This should be a truism for Jews 
and in Jewish Pedagogy. 

THE CONNECTION BETW^EEN HEBREW AND 
OTHER SUBJECTS. 

Again, the subject of Hebrew has been an all- 
around embarrassment, for Hebrew is detached 
from everything else we deal with in the Relig- 
ious School. We have not made any connec- 
tion between Hebrew and the other subjects; 
but such a connection must be made if Hebrew 
is to have a legitimate place in the Course of 
Subjects. And such a connection can be made. 
A language is the expression of civilization, its 
most representative part. Without its language, 
the picture of the period is incomplete and un- 



190 AIMS OF TEACHING 

real. We should bring the pupil to feel the same 
sort of awe in the presence of a Hebrew word as 
we want him to feel in the presence of a Jewish 
hero. Joshua, for instance, must talk his own 
tongue to complete the picture of him. It is a 
pedagogic mistake to bring a personality before 
children, talk about him all the time and never 
let him open his mouth himself. Let Joshua 
play upon the imagination full-tide, but let 
him be a Hebrew Joshua, who talks Hebrew. 
A snatch or two of his own words, on signifi- 
cant occasions in his story, will help to make 
him real. And it will help to solve the pro- 
blem of "Hebrew in the Jewish School." 
We have looked at the question of the teaching 
of Hebrew only from the point of view of the 
services and the prayer book, but we have not 
looked at it from the point of view of consistent 
portraiture of Jewish history. Hebrew gets 
value and meaning just as soon as the child sees 
that it is talked by the men and women whom 
he is admiring. And Hebrew becomes also a 
religious language just as soon as the child sees 
that great men speak it in great situations. We 
have made Hebrew merely a vehicle for our 
liturgy, quite unreal in our day, and it is small 
wonder that childhood does not take to it. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 191 

HEBREW IN THE LIFE OF THE BIBLE. 

Hebrew is necessary to the correct setting of 
the story, but, of course, the lesson must not be 
crowded with quotations; the tactful teacher 
will know the limits, as he will know also how 
and when. But into the texture of his story 
he must weave the right word into the right 
place. It should not be, in Jewish Schools, 
that the men of the Bible talk English, 
being, as it were, ancient Englishmen. Let 
the Hebrew v/ord the teacher gives be signifi- 
cant, uttered by the hero on a significant 
occasion. Associate the ancient word with the 
ancient fact. I might also demand that the 
child should, at the end of the lesson, 
possess a number of Hebrew clinch words, 
so that by the recollection of them he can re- 
vive the moral situations which the lesson 
contains. I recommend this method of treat- 
ment not only because it is suggested by truth- 
ful pedagogy, but also for reasons of expedi- 
ency. The employment of Hebrew in the 
midst of history - teaching will familiarize 
children with the Hebrew sounds and give 
them the language feeling toward the He- 
brew, as a preparation for more technical 
instruction in the language later on. When 



192 AIMS OF TEACHING 

once the child has ceased to regard Hebrew as 
aloof, most of the long-standing difficulty will 
have been overcome. 

THE MORAL SPIRIT. 

Do not begin to teach Hebrew by impos- 
ing upon the children the unreasoning task 
of laboring with consonants and vowels ; there 
is no life in such a task. Lay the founda- 
tion for a respectful attitude toward the 
Hebrew; that is enough for the time being; 
later classes can advance from that toward 
more. Besides, it is the cultural content of 
Hebrew at which we should aim. It is not im- 
portant that the children should know Hebrew 
for its own sake, but it is important that they 
get the moral and religious spirit which the 
Hebrew holds. The Jewish conception of 
charity, for instance, is suggested by the term 
Zedakah, as by no other term. Nothing can 
so convey the Jewish psychology as the Hebrew 
terms and the Hebrew language do. 

The teaching of Hebrew will have a revival 
just as soon as we make a right appraisal 
of it as a form of discipline for moral and relig- 
ious ends. A language is spoken only in so far 
as it is the vehicle of the moral life. An official, 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 193 

a ritualistic language, a language employed 
merely in the church or in the synagogue, is no 
language at all. We cannot galvanize the 
Hebrew into life ; we cannot make it solemn by 
any artifice. Children feel and resent the con- 
fusion into which we have brought the subject 
of Hebrew. We cannot cut the Gordian knot 
by abolishing the Hebrew, for then we aggra- 
vate the difficulty. The Hebrew language had 
a place in the life of the people and it was the 
organ of Jewish piety, and it must remain a 
vehicle for it as long as we need that piety and 
want to possess it. 



194 AIMS OF TEACHING 

THE PICTURE IN THE RELIGIOUS 
SCHOOL. 

Much has been said about the educational 
value of the Picture. It must be conceded 
that it contributes effectively to bring out con- 
crete facts of life and history. But not every 
period of childhood requires the aid of the 
picture and at certain stages of the child-senses 
and the child-mind the picture might be even 
harmful. It may disturb or hinder the per- 
sonal fancy and the constructive capacities 
which are an essential element of the soul. 
The teacher should so present the lesson that 
the pupil will invest it with life himself. 
•There should be better ground for introducing 
the picture than that it furnishes enter- 
tainment. Many an entertainment is ac- 
tually an educational disturbance. It often 
introduces matter which is foreign to the school 
work, having only a remote relevancy to it, 
and not infrequently it is a direct interference 
with the development of the subject which the 
teacher in his lesson has worked up with 
care. The picture is mostly presented to 
the entire school at its assembly, and the 
subjects and persons are chosen with disregard 
for the specific mental and moral status of each 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 195 

of the grades, causing a confusion from 
which the children do not recover easily. A 
class that is busy with Abraham is told about 
David, and a class of Kindergarten children is 
entertained with pictures on piety whose 
ethical significance they cannot and perhaps 
should not grasp as yet. Nor is it advisable to 
use the picture in all class rooms alike, for it 
remains still to be proven that the delicate 
virtues are rightly introduced into the child ex- 
perience by the crude means of spectacular 
entertainment. At any rate, what is im- 
pressive in this manner to one period of 
childhood may cause diffusion of mind and 
bring merely superficial sensation (and there- 
fore cause a downright harm) to others. At 
best, the picture can be employed as a rein- 
forcement of the lesson, and should never initi- 
ate a new lesson. Some pupils may find in the 
picture what is already familiar to them and 
some may get the pleasure that is incident to 
right training in the rediscovery of a truth and 
an interest. 

PICTURES SHOULD RE-STATE THE LESSON. 

School pictures on the whole should be 
educational and should restate and rein- 
force the school purpose and the school aim. 



196 AIMS OF TEACHING 

They should never become mere amusement. 
There is plenty of that and too much elsewhere. 
Nor should the school compete with the theater 
and the art museum. 

PICTURES AND THEIR RELATION TO 
IMAGINATION. 

There is another point of view which should 
make teachers cautious with regard to the em- 
ployment of the picture in Religious School 
work. A lesson is impressive not merely because 
it is true, but also because of the characters that 
personify it. The men and women of the Bible 
are typical of religious and moral truth by 
themselves, and do not need spectacular 
means to make them so. Besides, no edu- 
cational influence is complete until it has set 
the child's fancy at work; but artistic pre- 
sentations may handicap its fancy. The child's 
own imagination should be free to work, but 
the picture may either anticipate or con- 
tradict it. In either case, the picture has de- 
stroyed what the lesson meant to build up. The 
injunction of Moses "Thou shalt not make unto 
thyself any graven image!" shows a profound 
knowledge of soul-life and is the best plea we 
have for real creative imagination. It has 
liberated the finest power we have. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 197 

JEWISH CHILDREN AND THE CULTIVATION 
OF THE IMAGINATION. 

Jewish children need the cuhure of the 
imagination as all children do, and a little 
more. For in the first place there is much 
prose in Reformed Judaism in its prin- 
ciples and cold intellectualities, and this is 
what makes Jewish life so narrowly practical 
and the Jewish communities so stolidly con- 
ventional. Our Religious Schools would do 
a needed work if they would lift the next 
generation of Jews and Jewesses into more 
love for and participation in the culture 
of the beautiful. Perhaps modern Jews are 
unspirited because they neglect the imagina- 
tion. Where the soul is dependent upon what 
others give it, there is spiritual poverty and im- 
potence. Instead of putting before the children 
what others have conceived, the lesson should 
act upon them in such a way that they would 
project out of themselves what they see with 
their own mind's eye. 

The test of a good lesson is not whether the 
pupil knows it, but whether it has stirred his in- 
ner life. The deepest stir possible, however, is 
that of the imagination; it is the most active 
and the most personal. 



198 AIMS OF TEACHING 

CARE IN THE CHOICE OF PICTURES. 

It goes without saying that when the picture 
is employed, it should be chosen with the ut- 
most discrimination. The usual biblical pict- 
ures are rarely conceived in a Jewish spirit. In 
such Motion Pictures that are now available 
the biblical theme, as well as the characters, 
are adjusted to the exigencies of the modern 
stage and the taste of the average theater- 
trained public, and so degraded and not in- 
frequently brutalized. 

THE USE OF THE PICTURE AFTER THE 
LESSON. 

I should recommend the use of the picture 
only after a completed lesson, provided, of 
course, the teacher has himself studied the 
picture before he introduces it into his work. It 
may serve the following purposes : The picture 
may restate the lesson, and help make it vivid 
and real. But the picture must not cheapen the 
effect of the lesson, nor rob it of its sanctity. 
In the Motion Picture an Abraham who 
struts the stage before the children runs the 
risk of familiarity breeding contempt. 

The picture may correct misunderstandings 
due to the haziness of the subject or the in- 
exactness of the teacher. A picture therefore 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 199 

should be brought forward only after the lesson 
has been presented. The picture should not be 
offered at the beginning of the lesson, for that 
forestalls self-effort on the part of the children. 
Nor should the picture be mere amuse- 
ment. The child should feel a certain satisfac- 
tion that the picture endorses what he himself 
imagined. The picture may be resorted to in 
order to convey information which words might 
be incapable of conveying, as for instance, 
oriental life, which it is too much to expect the 
American child should know without aid. 
Sometimes it is advisable to connect ancient life 
with modern life by means of representations of 
contemporary oriental customs and conditions 
to illustrate and vivify the lesson. 

THE CHILD-STANDARD. 

Finally it is conceivable that the artistic 
portrayal of religious life cannot but heighten 
respect for it. Here again I must warn against 
the melodramatic, the spurious and the false. 
Who knows what spiritual harm has come to 
child souls from certain works of art, even the 
best, which, true to adults, are misleading and 
perplexing to children.^ What is true for the 
mature is not necessarily equally true for boys 
and girls. The criterion for the choice of art 



200 AIMS OF TEACHING 

expression is the child himself. How will the 
child see it, how will the child understand it, 
what will the picture do in the child — these are 
the prime questions. 

THE LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL IS PART 
OF JEWISH MORALITY. 

It is a misconception, from the point of view 
of Jewish education, to maintain that Judaism, 
or rather Mosaism, has discouraged art. Noth- 
ing is farther from the actual facts. If the art 
instinct had really been methodically aborted 
amongst us Jews, modern Jews would not have 
taken to it so readily and so enthusiastically as 
soon as the avenues for liberal culture were 
opened to them. On the contrary, imagination 
and creative fancy are of the very elements of 
Jewish psychology. In the Jew the sense of 
the beautiful is interwoven with all the phases 
of his soul life. The fact deserves a full con- 
sideration, and I mention it here because I wish 
to apply it to Jewish pedagogy. The Jewish 
religious school does not limit itself to the 
teaching of principles and doctrines, it culti- 
vates the Jewish soul and the love of the beau- 
tiful is a cardinal virtue in Jewish religious- 
ness. The search for the beautiful is a 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 201 

part of the moral and religious life. This, per- 
haps, is what the Rabbis meant when they 
said, "The ignorant cannot be pious ;" that is, 
the dull, the unobservant, those who cannot go 
beyond the limits of their senses, cannot attain 
to the real serenity of life. The Religious 
School must save our present Jewish generation 
from the error that Judaism regards the love 
of the beautiful as outside of religious and 
moral interests. Judaism has been altogether 
too philosophic; it is time it were made more 
human. One can be spiritual and still love life 
and desire to enhance and beautify it. 

LOVE OF ART IS PART OF HUMAN NATURE. 

Art is not an accomplishment, it is a moral 
phase of life. For the most part, art is taught 
for its application to industry. But in the 
Religious School, love of art is a trait of human 
nature to be cultivated because it refines. It 
has a moral value because it is part of the char- 
acter. The Jew is sensitive, sympathetic 
and quick to respond to appeals, because he 
realizes the tragedies of human life in his own 
person. One must have imagination to have 
sympathy. 



202 AIMS OF TEACHING 

JEWISH MORALITY INTENSIFIES LOVE OF 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 

I plead for more attention to the esthetic 
instinct, so that the Jew may make his moraUty 
deeper than mere opinion, and loftier than 
mere conventiality. The Jewish Religious 
School fails to stir the Jewish child, because it 
teaches conventional morality, while Judaism, 
which the school is to teach, has a finer 
moral content. We teach ethical precepts 
which we could well take for granted for the 
Jewish child. We argue too much in our 
schools, and we will never win the child for 
high moral ideals unless we open his mind and 
eye to the beauty and the sanctities all about 
him, in his fellow men and in nature. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 203 



THE SABBATH AND THE HOLY DAYS. 

This subject is usually not dealt with in the 
school in any specific way. The children are 
told to observe the festivals at the same time, 
in the same spirit, and in the same manner as 
adults do. But experience proves that chil- 
dren do not associate any deep feeling with the 
religious holidays, not even such a feeling as 
they have for holidays of a secular character. 
It may be too much to expect that children 
shall appreciate the solemnity which attaches 
to days of profound religious exaltation, but it 
is fair to presume that, as these festivals have a 
religious bearing in the first instance upon men 
and women and the community, they may also 
contain some spiritual food for children's souls. 
It is only a question of right interpretation, and 
the teacher should be able to supply that. The 
Sabbath may mean something other to children 
than it means for adults, if for no other reason 
than that the appeal of the Sabbath for rest 
from labor has only a secondary application 
for children. But the Sabbath may be made 
for children an occasion for occupations other 
and higher minded than those of the week- 
days. 



204 AIMS OF TEACHING 

THE FESTIVALS AND THE PLACE OF THE 
CHILD IN THEM. 

Each of the three Pilgrim Festivals can be 
brought home to the affection of the childhood 
of today. Our fathers associated them with 
Festivals of Nature, as Jewish custom and 
folk-lore show very abundantly. The child 
has a place in all of them (as questioner in 
Haggada, as noisemaker at Purim and, 
happiest of all, at Simchath Thbra) and from 
the aspect of training much can be done by 
them for the child. Pesach is a festival 
of freedom, the very theme in which chil- 
dren require guidance. Shabuoth, with its 
boughs of green, is a beautiful spring festival, 
and the feast of Sukkoth touches the youthful 
delight in nature. The children almost antici- 
pate us in all of these. Even the days of Rosh 
Hashana and Yom Kippur, with their simple 
message that man can and should work with 
and not against God, are not only not out- 
side of child comprehension but of the very 
substance of naive child piety. Hanukkah and 
Purim are in the very form of their celebration, 
as well as in their original conception, festivals 
of loyalty. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 205 

HOLIDAYS ARE EDUCATIONAL IN PURPOSE. 

We can well afford to postpone the teaching 
of the more pretentious dogmatic content of the 
festivals to the period of growing youth, when it 
does not regard as a vacation a day conse- 
crated by religion, but with a more mature con- 
ception of mind. The duty of the teacher is 
pre-eminently to help the child as child. It has 
a right to being served in the needs it has now 
and it is not fair to it to neglect it now for the 
sake of a remote need which may arise later on. 
Festivals, even the national and so-called 
secular ones, are educational, if they are any- 
thing at all, and they are influences in the 
child's moral and religious development. 

CHILD-SERVICE. 

The ritualistic celebration of a Festival is 
only its formal side, and formalism is tolerable 
in the school only by virtue of the discipline it 
carries. The ritualism of the Synagogue was 
developed by men and women in centuries past, 
the ritualism of the school is yet to be devised. 
It is not sufficient to reduce the services to 
child-size, to hold services in the School Build- 
ing just as they are held in the Temple, with 
no other change than shortening the prescribed 
formulas of the prayer and simplifying the 



206 AIMS OF TEACHING 

vocabulary and the rhetoric. A child service is 
altogether different from the worship of adults 
in conception as well as in form. We hear 
all through Jewish history the complaint 
as to the unruliness of children in the Syna- 
gogue, and every parent and teacher knows 
how difficult it is to hold children down to 
decorous and regular attendance. The reason is 
not that the adult services are too long, but 
that they mean so little to childhood. Their 
content is devised to express adult religiousness 
and not child religiousness. It is not a difficulty 
as to word or phrase, but as to what these are 
all about.. 

THE SABBATH AND THE CHILDREN. 

We can make the Sabbath, for instance, 
a living fact in Jewish childhood, if we interpret 
it in the sense in which it is significant 
for child life. We can solve the trouble- 
some Sabbath Question, at least for children, 
when we reassert the moral meaning of the 
Sabbath. Similar educational reform work 
could be made for the holidays and the festivals. 
Their now unused resources should be em- 
ployed in the congregational life. The Great 
Holidays which, under the present conditions, 
have such a forbidding aspect to the boys and 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 207 

girls might become springs of religious stir, for 
they take place at the beginning of the season 
of school work and of the school year. Youth is 
open to the charm and the mystery of life, and 
nothing the children learn in the course of 
technical study is as likely to enter their souls 
as the solemnity of the Rosh Hashana and the 
Yom Kippur. The three holidays of Pesach, 
Shabuoth and Sukkoth, which the pupils of our 
Public and Private Schools treat almost with 
contempt, could, by the mere opening of the 
doors of the Synagogue to the children 
for active participation in a Service of 
their own, become at least a counter attraction 
to the schools. The insistance upon the 
children's absence from the sessions of the 
public schools on holidays, without offering a 
quid pro quo, is unfair to the schools and 
unjust to childhood. Only our giving the 
children something better than the public 
school can give and something which the 
children con obtain from no one else except 
from us, can warrant our demand that they 
spend the day at the Synagogue. We should 
be able to convey to childhood some of 
that spiritual good which the holidays hold. 
But we cannot convey it merely as through a 
funnel. We cannot expect fruit by pasting 



208 AIMS OF TEACHING 

blossoms upon twigs. The soul grows from 
within, as everything else grows. And growth 
is not mere coaxing. It is activity of the self. 
We allow no opportunity for self-activity. The 
Holidays, as the weekly Sabbaths of the year, 
should become occasions for self-effort, just as 
is all moral life, all life. The youths should have 
an opportunity for religious work, if we demand 
from them that they ripen into religious char- 
acters. They must have it, for they cannot 
ripen otherwise than by working out their char- 
acters. 

THE DAY OF ATONEMENT. 

Even the prescribed fasting is a moral disci- 
pline. Voluntary abstention from food on the 
Day of Atonement re-enforces the power of 
self-control so necessary in life. We have 
a right to expect to get from religion 
that self-possession which is so sorely absent 
from the average man and woman of today. 
We must introduce a right and broad motive 
if the virtue of stamina is to have any moral 
worth. That is why our fathers prescribed 
days of self-abnegation, on which all were 
alike under the same moral stimulation — 
an evidence of psychologic insight of the highest 
degree. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 209 

BELOW THE AGE OF TWELVE YEARS. 

Children under the age of twelve should not 
be constrained to attend public worship. They 
have no capacity for co-operation in spiritual 
activities, and the ritual we observ^e is largely 
contemplation, for which children are not 
mature enough. 

PARTICIPATION OF CHILDREN IN PUBLIC 
WORSHIP. 

The age of Confirmation is the period at 
which the child may begin his public religious 
functions. There was a time in the Syna- 
gogue when the child was accorded at least 
some minor participation in the worship of men, 
and it is possible to find a place for him there 
today. I might suggest children's choirs, if I did 
not remember that Jewish Congregations are so 
pretentious about the music in the Synagogue ; 
they want "fine" music and do not think of 
hearty, genuinely felt music. They think of 
esthetic enjoyment and forget that music is a 
sacred art. They esteem artistic values and 
make sacrifices for it and neglect an oppor- 
tunity, perhaps the best opportunity afforded 
them, to train elevated feelings in their chil- 



210 AIMS OF TEACHING 

dren. But we may admit children to the Read- 
ing from the Thorah on the Sabbath and on the 
HoHdays. Only that I must warn parents 
against their natural weakness to regard such 
public reading by their children from the point 
of view of parental pride. The reading is not 
meant for elocution, it is training in piety 
and in the avowal of it. I might even 
suggest letting the children read some of 
the Prayers of the Service, if I did not fear 
that it might provoke precocious self-con- 
sciousness. But this danger may be obviated 
by the tactful teacher, supported by sympa- 
thetic parents, who can lead the children to re- 
gard religious exercise in the light of a solemn 
duty. We must satisfy the growing religious 
need of the rising generation which often finds 
itself debarred from participation in matters of 
the Synagogue. Indifference creeps in where 
there is inactivity. Some congregations as- 
sign to the young men the office of usher- 
ing and the like, and think they are thus 
giving them recognition. But the work young 
men do in the Synagogue should be commen- 
surate with their religious needs. They are to 
do religious and not menial work. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 211 

THE NEGLECT OF CHILDREN ON THE 
HOLIDAYS. 

One thing is certain, we do little for the chil- 
dren when we signalize the Sabbath and the 
Holiday for them by simply shutting up 
shop. It frequently means not much else than 
literally shutting up shop as to every exercise 
of the mind and sentiment, and releasing the 
children for a freedom which sets adrift their 
irresponsible spirit. I wish I could disabuse 
anxious parents of the notion that it is 
good for the health of children to romp about 
indiscriminately. We are letting the most im- 
portant element of character go wild for lack of 
any chastening influence. Festivals are, so far 
as training is implicated in them, not mere 
pauses for rest and occasions for jollification, 
but occasions devised by the ages-long wisdom 
of our ancestry to put into the relief of con- 
sciousness the great facts of our human life. 
Nowhere else than in the Religious School is 
provision made for these — surely not in public 
school education, which is practical and almost 
sordid and addresses itself to the child's event- 
ual earning capacity alone. 



212 AIMS OF TEACHING 

CHILD-DEVOTION AND THE MORAL MEANING 
OF THE SABBATH. 

We may demand that children attend reU- 
gious services, but we must supply them with 
reasons why they should. That it will benefit 
them remains everlastingly unproven, and 
perhaps not to them alone. The allegation 
that it will please their parents, children do not 
take seriously, since it is not taken seriously by 
the parents themselves. We cannot have more 
than superficial results from child-attendance 
at Festival and Sabbath Services as long as they 
do not provide satisfaction for child-needs and 
child-soul life and we maintain the theological 
forms of the Sabbath and the Festival which 
have nothing in them for child life. We persist 
in a sad error of judgment, to our irreparable 
loss. The Sabbath has potent power for 
good in child-life, even more than it would 
have if we succeeded in forcing it upon 
modern business. For the Sabbath is essen- 
tially a moral institution and so is ever}^ 
holiday in Israel. If the teacher were free to 
re-interpret Jewish devotion, we should enter 
the finest stage in our history, and we should be 
relieved of much cajoling which we must now 
do to catch adults. The Sabbath and the 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 213 

Festivals are, when the last word is spoken, les- 
sons of the great Schoolmaster of all the ages 
(sometimes we call him the genius of our 
race), by which all the truths of the Jewish 
life have been made impressive and real. 

THE child's sabbath AND CHILD-IDEALS. 

Let the Sabbath become a day on which the 
child is directed toward ideals it either feels 
or has heard and read of ; let the child do some- 
thing (under guidance) that its little soul wants 
to do and for which during the course of the 
preoccupied week it has had neither oppor- 
tunity nor freedom ; let it come into touch with 
the finer things of life, of which it has heard 
during the week and which it wants to meet 
face to face; let the Sabbath be a day for in- 
terests which are crowded out by the daily 
routine; let the child feel the exhilaration of 
freedom which, after all, is the real meaning of 
rest. Let, in fine, the child apply what it has 
been taught and found itself restricted all the 
week to express, and the Sabbath will acquire a 
sanctity for the child such as our conventional 
ritual can never produce. The Sabbath is a 
great opportunity we have for ennobling the 
souls of our children, but we neglect and debase 



214 AIMS OF TEACHING 

it by our insistence upon their conforming to 
the semblance of piety as comprised in Syna- 
gogue attendance and which in our hearts we 
know is often mere hypocrisy. To be sure, the 
genuine use of the Sabbath, as a day for the 
cultivation of ideals which, though unde- 
veloped, are still real in child-life, throws a 
burden upon parents and teachers, who must 
be keen to watch, tactful to handle and sincere 
to foster them. They should be the last to com- 
plain as to this responsibility and ought to 
rejoice to respond to it. 

CHILDREN DO NOT NEED PUBLIC W^ORSHIP. 

The point that the children assemble is not 
so important as that they should grow spirit- 
ually, and we must not forget that child- 
hood does not thrive best under the spur of 
meetings. There are times when we adults 
prefer to be alone, and there are times 
when we are anxious for the invigorating stir 
of assembly. Similarly the child at certain 
periods of his religious growth is at his best and 
sometimes he is at his worst in "assembly." 
At least three-fourths of our child attendants 
neither desire nor need and are better for 
not attending assemblies in prayer and 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 215 

worship. The necessity for and the benefit 
from congregational worship arises later in 
life, at the age of adolescence, when it 
might be reserved for the boys and girls with 
great profit. They are then more capable of 
merging their personalities into communion 
with other personalities and can enter into that 
intangible soul communication which is the 
necessary basis of public worship. 



216 AIMS OF TEACHING 



CHILDREN'S SERVICES. 

Children cannot constitute a congregation 
and cannot enter into congregational worship. 
Our adult synagogue service requires adjust- 
ment to child nature and child needs. In a 
Children's Service the children look up to the 
teacher rather than to the minister. The con- 
ventional Children's Service books now in use 
confuse child faith and child education. We 
cannot engage in worship and teach at the 
same time. A book of child worship must be 
written by one who knows and respects the 
character of child faith. 

Worship implies submission to the laws 
which rule the world and to the God who 
sustains it. The healthy child is far from feel- 
ing such pious submissiveness ; it wants to do 
big things and delights in the show as much 
as in the use of strength. It expresses its 
regard for law and for the great God of life 
by seeking rather than resigning power. Its 
worship is therefore quite other than adult 
worship. 

We should not insist upon children attending 
Temple Services, as if through such attendance 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 217 

religion were borne into them in some mystic 
manner. We should certainly not lead them 
to believe that prayer and ritual as such do 
anything for them. We may let children share 
in worship that the spiritual influence play 
about their growing souls, but not for self- 
expression. Children can say nothing of creed, 
for creed is formal and speculative, while child- 
hood is rich in instinct and craves activity. A 
service that has its center in the formal accept- 
ance of a creed cannot express nor satisfy child 
nature and child life. 

THE COMMUNAL CHARACTER OF WORSHIP. 

And again, worship is a communal function, 
into which riien and women enter by a com- 
mon social need and through common history, 
and, as such, it is alien to childhood. Children 
up to the age of adolescence are individual, not 
social. A pre-adolescent child feels itself lost in 
the crowd and does not think of attaching any- 
where. No child under twelve should be 
constrained to attend a public adult service, for 
such attendance is, at best, nugatory. Partici- 
pation in public worship does not create reli- 
giousness; children are not a whit more reli- 
gious when they have gotten through a public 
service. This does not mean that children are 



218 AIMS OF TEACHING 

not capable of a religiousness of their own, of a 
child religiousness ; but it means that we must 
afford them an opportunity for the cultivation 
of their own pieties. The adult public service 
does not affect them, because it ignores them. 

CHILD-V^ORSHIP. 

Children should have a service of their 
own, not one in imitation of what grown 
people do, nor an adult service shortened and 
inf antilized. It must be constructed altogether 
differently ; it must have action in it and more 
symbolism as well as poetry. Remember that 
the drama and the arts, even dancing, origi- 
nated in worship; traces of this origin still 
linger in modern church liturgy and church 
literature. Child worship may have an antique 
form, for the archaic form is impressive. Bibli- 
cal selections have, therefore, a legitimate place 
in child worship. But the most important point 
is that child worship may not contain refer- 
ences to sin and contrition, for these subjects 
are not a part of child religion; the child 
has no sense of sinfulness and should not 
have it. It is wrong to force upon the child 
regret and remorse before it has the capacity 
to do the right or repair the wrong. Sin is a 
theolorical notion and the child conscience is 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 219 

as different from the adult conscience as child 
wrongs are different from adult wrongs. Adults 
do wrong, being aware that they can choose 
between good and bad, and make the choice 
deliberately. But the child does wrong not 
in conscious rebellion, but through incapacity 
and unripeness of will. In fact, I should 
say child sins are really virtues in the making, 
for the child carries on an unconscious struggle 
toward the right. To constrain the child to 
dwell on the bad things it has done is cruel. 
It is much more helpful, and it is also more 
humane, to encourage the better instincts and 
capacities of the child by reminding it of 
the good things it has achieved. Worship, 
therefore, would have more moral point for the 
child if it emphasized what childhood does and 
means to do well. Child service should be full 
of encouragements and incentives. 



220 AIMS OF TEACHING 



THE SCHOOL ENTERTAINMENTS AND 
SCHOOL SERVICES. 

The term "Entertainment" is a misnomer 
so far as it refers to the Rehgious School. It 
must have an educational meaning, if enter- 
tainment is to have any legitimate place in the 
school. Mere diversion and amusement are 
there entirely out of place; there is plenty of 
that for the child outside. I suspect that much 
of the entertaining done in the Religious School 
is resorted to to keep the children in good 
humor and to hold them in attendance and at- 
tention. But school exercises and school en- 
tertainments have a serious educational signi- 
ficance and are a part of the work of school and 
teacher. 

COMMUNION. 

School exercises have the function to culti- 
vate the larger sense of community and com- 
munion into which the children will enter by 
and by. Children must learn to adjust them- 
selves to society and acquire the sense of 
citizenship. There was a time when the 
attainment of the age of majority was a holiday 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 221 

and a sacred function. In a certain sense the 
Bar Mitzvah was and the Confirmation ought 
to become such. The assembly of children, their 
entrance into a congregation and their sharing 
in a common exercise, should constitute an ex- 
perience for them. The program of such gather- 
ings, therefore, should result in the children's 
feeling of community. The children should be 
broadened in their conception of life and feel 
themselves near to one another in the profound 
things of human experience and they should 
pass back to their homes and their respective 
class work with the feeling that the world 
is larger than the class room and human 
life is something bigger than child-life. For 
Jewish children, finally, the school gathering is 
an opportunity for the cultivation of that soli- 
darity which is so essential to all that is 
momentous to the Jewish people and for the 
cultivation of which modern life offers so few 
opportunities. 

SOCIAL SYMPATHIES. 

These exercises signalize and help to im- 
press, not personal feelings nor personal be- 
liefs, but social sympathies, such as youth in- 



222 AIMS OF TEACHING 

dulges with splendid dreaminess. This larger 
sense of life, accordingly, determines the aim 
and the content of school entertainments and 
school festivals. The assemblage of the chil- 
dren offers occasions for influence of this 
broadening character. 

PROGRAM. 

This conception of school assemblies, of 
course, determines their program. It must have 
a definite construction almost like that of a 
liturgy. Nothing has contributed more to the 
inaneness of congregational gatherings, than 
the conventional program of "numbers." A 
program must have articulated construction if 
it is to have any inherent meaning. It should 
be built up as a ritual is built up. The man who 
will help us to be clear and definite in this mat- 
ter will make a substantial contribution to 
Religious Education. But, of course, he will 
have to make a similarly clear analysis as to 
what ritual is for adults. 

For the purpose of school work, however, it 
is sufficient for the time being to lay down this 
rule: that every assembly of the children 
should be occupied with a precise thought and 
ideal as to associated Hfe. The children should 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 223 

be given a presentation of what is inevitable 
and dominant as a law of their relationship to 
one another. They should be made solemnly 
aware of the great good that comes to them 
from co-operation, just as they should have an 
intimation of the damage that accrues to each 
when loyalty is violated by one of them. They 
should carry away the conviction that the law 
of God is in them, in their lives and in all about 
them equally. To be sure all this is to be done 
with due regard for the range of child thought 
and child feeling and child experience, but none 
the less with a view of lifting these into the 
plane of religious fervor. 

THE TEACHER IN THE CHILD-ASSEMBLIES. 

Since it is a discipline and a training, this 
child worship should be under the personal 
guidance of the teacher, and the practice of 
putting up some child to read the prayer, 
or, still worse, of converting the children's 
assembly into an occasion for bright pupils 
to shine, is to be condemned. The Children's 
Service is either a part of instruction and dis- 
cipline, and then it is a matter of the teacher's 
work, or else it is an experience in piety, and 
then its performance by a child reduces it to 



224 AIMS OF TEACHING 

the level of a recitation. On the contrary, it 
is just on such earnest occasions as prayer that 
the teacher attains to his real dignity before 
his pupils as the spokesman of religious veri- 
ties, and his withdrawal from leadership at 
worship is tantamount to his neglect of duty. 
Every conscientious teacher should welcome 
the opportunity to stand before his children as 
the interpreter of sacred aspirations. He will 
find that the significance of such functions will 
lift his work and will enhance the children's 
respect for him. 

Given the purpose for which the classes of a 
school assemble, the program becomes defi- 
nite. In the Assembly Room there should be 
no teaching. It is a place for child-worship. 
The main object is to give expression to mutu- 
alities, to large-hearted feelings, to common 
enthusiasm into which each child enters with 
natural and generous elation. These child- 
gatherings and child services are a training for 
adult congregational worship in Temple and 
Synagogue. We complain that adults do not 
attend Services, but what right have we to ex- 
pect them to attend when we have done 
nothing to establish in them either the interest 
in religious worship or the self-abandon with- 
out which there can be no devotion? 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 225 

THE CHILD-SERVICE. 

The fact that the school worship has for its 
aim to estabHsh the broad reUgious sympathies 
and the feehng of solidarity, under the dictates 
of common humanity and tradition, gives the 
standard for selection of the prayers and 
psalms and of the other features of the Child 
Prayer Book. In the first place these should 
approximate the Prayer Book of the adults as 
much as possible, so as to help in making the 
transition from child prayers to adult prayers 
natural and to obviate the break which has ob- 
tained between them till now. It is not fair to 
thrust the Bar Mitzvah or the Confirmand into 
Adult Service and expect him to take part in it 
intelligently and sympathetically. It is not 
even suiRcient to tell him about it, and expect 
the information to do the rest. There must be 
training for affiliation with impersonal public 
worship, if the boy and the girl are to take their 
place in the Temple and Synagogue fully. In 
the second place, children's services should ad- 
dress themselves to child-life and should not be 
copies of adult philosophy and adult theology. 
The Child Service should have meaning for the 
child. The prayer should express what the child 
prays for, or rather what the piety of the 



226 AIMS OF TEACHING 

child craves. It is not a question whether 
the thoughts should not be "above the heads of 
the child," or in simple language, or short, or 
terse. The main consideration should be that 
the prayers be the child's own and express 
what the child longs for and needs. It will be 
found that the high moments of child-life are 
very different from those of grown-up men and 
women. The objects wished and the soul-con- 
dition seem trival, but the child's psychic 
nature can also rise to noble heights. 

RESPONSIVE READING. 

Responsive reading has decided value in 
child worship. It constrains conformation in 
the recital of each to all, and it is likely to 
express the common terms of child thought on 
religion and conduct. (It must, of course, be 
prepared for in the separate class rooms.) It is 
the simplest form of ritual and therefore 
quite practicable. But it must not be used too 
much, for the ministration by a presiding 
teacher or minister is more impressive for chil- 
dren. Responsive reading in adult worship was 
originally a concession to the democratic spirit, 
but this has no relevancy in the school service. 
Children alternate with the teacher not because 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 227 

they have any official standing in worship equal 
to his, but because they require some oppor- 
tunity for co-operation with one another. 

THE MUSIC. 

It would be helpful to give the form of 
chanting to this responsiveness between teacher 
and pupils. Music is a better vehicle for 
spiritual consonance than prose recitation. 
The well-known musical responses, are very 
useful, but they should not be sparse in 
the Service. The hesitation of the teacher, 
on the score of his not being gifted with 
a melodious voice, is entirely unwarranted. 
Any voice will do, if it is backed by 
real feeling and earnestness. Children are 
tolerant to the man they respect and are 
oblivious to shortcomings which loom large to 
adults only when they think of themselves 
rather than of their duty. Every teacher should 
chant with the children as ministrant, frankly 
and sincerely, and he will find to his delight 
that the children accept him as a matter of 
course and respond to him with hearty readi- 
ness. I have heard Catholic priests intone with 
great harshness, but I have not heard any wor- 
shiper express contempt or protest. Genu- 



228 AIMS OF TEACHING 

ine piety has no time to watch others and to 
find fault, and where there is devotion there 
is no impertinent criticism. 

THE SERMON. 

The Sermon should be the culmination 
of the worship. This, in fact, it is meant to be 
also in adult services. It comes after the 
Reading of the Law, and as its interpretation. 
For children, however, it is doubtful whether 
the sermon, be it ever so short, is not an intru- 
sion upon the spiritual uplift which the chil- 
dren's service is designed to produce. A sermon 
is either a lesson or a plea and a pleading. 
But the emotional stir should be sufficient re- 
ligious experience at one time. Anyway, in- 
struction has no place in an exercise which has 
for its aim the cultivation of feeling. We must 
hold instruction rigidly apart from edification. 
Besides, teaching in the mass is never effective. 
There is a certain reserve which even the most 
tractable and susceptible child, almost as a 
grown-up, holds sacred to himself, and he feels 
hurt at being harangued in public. If, how- 
ever, the teacher deems it necessary to address 
his children, he should be careful as to the 
choice of his subject and the manner of his 
treatment. The children's assembly pre- 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 229 

scribes neutral subjects. There should be 
neither innuendo nor blunt reference to indi- 
vidual children, and every form of scolding 
or disciplinary correction should be avoided. 
The children's sermon, if it is made a part of 
the service, should present idylls of life, such 
as will heighten and refine the piety of the 
children and send them back to their environ- 
ment with an ideal. 

One word as to the manner of presentation. 
Children are entitled to noble language and 
they expect the sermon to have a form that com- 
ports with its significance. The teacher who 
talks cheaply lowers his influence and degrades 
the high cause he stands for. He does not come 
nearer to his pupils by being commonplace, 
and in all likelihood he causes estrangement be- 
tween himself and them. The language should 
be chosen with refinement. It should be clear, 
direct and sincere. The text of the ser- 
mon should be more than homiletic; it 
should fix the lesson. The teacher is ad- 
vised to select his biblical citations with 
care. An apt biblical quotation, employed at 
the right occasion and with well-calculated 
psychological effect, is worth a good deal as 
an educational influence. It is not so im- 
portant who said the significant word of the 



230 AIMS OF TEACHING 

quotation as it is what truth it states, and, 
especially, what it signifies to those to whom it 
is offered. 

One more word: Some school-preachers 
think they must feed the children with stories. 
Nothing has done more harm than that notion. 
A story is a tool for the educator, and it must 
be used, as any tool, only when it is needed. 
It is helpful, but it is nothing in itself. It is a 
tool, but it is not the material. Story telling 
often degenerates into an entertainment, and 
this is the more to be deplored, since the art of 
story telling is so difficult. A story told clum- 
sily is spoiled for right use forever. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 231 



MUSIC IN THE RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. 

Music is a means for religious influence in 
the Religious School or it should not be there. 
As a fine art it cannot be abused with 
impunity, not even with children. Religious 
music, and in our case Synagogue Music, 
should be a subject in the Course of Study of 
the Religious School, since it has an intrinsic 
educational value of its own. A wise teacher 
of music will relate it to history, to life and to 
character. Children should know who wrote 
the music that wings Jewish devotion, they 
should know that Jewish songs were sung 
in home and community under the stress of 
deep piety, and they should hear the story of 
those who composed them. We need not be 
discouraged by those who say that there is no 
original Jewish music; it has been the vehicle 
of intense feeling in the Jewish home and in 
Jewish community, and that is sufficient. The 
aim of the teacher must be to restore religious 
music to the present-day Jewish home and to 
see to it that the melodies are sung as part of 
the pious life of the people. 



232 AIMS OF TEACHING 

Sulzer, Naumbourg and Lewandowski 
should be restored to us before the droning 
church melodies now in vogue in our Religious 
School Hymnals have wrought their mischief. 

That alien hymns have crept into the Jewish 
Religious School is due to our lack of thought 
on that matter, to indifference of those from 
whom we have a right to expect professional 
help, and finally to the confusion into which 
the subject has lapsed. 

SCHOOL HYMNS. 

The hymns and responses which the children 
learn in the Religious School should be expres- 
sions of the religious emotion of the children 
while they engage in worship. They should 
be means for religious teaching and in- 
fluence just as the other subjects of the Relig- 
ious School curriculum. And in the third 
place, the school music should prepare for 
home worship and bring back into Jewish 
households the songs which were there in for- 
mer days. No teacher has done his duty in 
this matter until he has assured himself that 
the songs he teaches in his school room have 
become household songs in the homes of his 
pupils. We must crowd out the cheap and de- 
moralizing songs which are now current in 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 233 

Jewish family life. We may be able to do this 
by the school hymns if they are carefully 
chosen with reference to their fitness for the 
expression of genuine feeling. 

THE TEXT OF THE HYMNS. 

The texts are an important feature of hymns, 
and it is to be deeply regretted that so little 
thought has been given to their selection. For 
the most part texts have been taken over from 
Christian hymn books, on the easy assumption 
that they are religious. But we Jews need not 
borrow anywhere. We have abundant material 
of our own. The poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol 
and Judah Halevi are as good as, and better 
than those of any author of a Christian hymn 
book; they are, at least, more in keeping with 
Jewish sentiment. We can well afford to 
give them to our children; it is our duty, in 
fact, to give them to our Jewish childhood, 
which will quickly enough feel that they are 
spirit of its spirit. The text of the average 
School Hymnal now used in our Religious 
School often contradicts our teachings, and its 
flabby tone and stilted phraseology perplex the 
children and contribute much toward making 
Jewish child music uncongenial and repellant. 



234 AIMS OF TEACHING 

CONGREGATIONAL SINGING. 

Perhaps the difficulty we experience in the 
introduction of adult congregational singing is 
to be traced to the fact that the music forced 
on the congregation is alien, and the hesi- 
tation of the congregation to sing it is a 
subtle suggestion that the music and the 
words make no appeal to their souls. I have 
yet to come upon a congregation which does 
not take to the En Kelohenu quite readily. 
Text and music seem out of the very life of the 
Jewish people. Let us re-introduce Jewish 
congregational singing (for as a matter of fact 
congregational singing is Jewish in origin and 
came into Christian worship by way of the 
synagogue) . We can restore it best by teaching 
our children to respect the responses and 
the hymns they learn in the school. We need 
not plan that they, in their turn, may teach these 
melodies to their parents, for this is an inver- 
sion of the natural order which even the sacred 
cause cannot make either logical or natural. 
These children will eventually themselves be 
parents and will hand down the musical 
and liturgical tradition. Music can do more 
than anything else to impart piety to the 
modern home and to hold it there. And it is 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 235 

the oportunity of the Religious School to bring 
this about. 

SINGING SHOULD BE NATURAL AND HEARTY. 

There is no absolute need for an organ or a 
piano. Good singing can be called out of chil- 
dren by any suggestive teacher without elabo- 
rate equipment. Nor is a hymn book in the 
hand of each child an essential requirement. 
In fact, it is advisable to see to it that the chil- 
dren get the repertoire of Jewish music "by 
heart." Music comes best out of the soul of the 
children when they sing freely, without their 
eyes on their books. It is especially desirable 
that the children sing their responses in the 
service spontaneously. This is merely a matter 
of previous drill and right spirit. But, by all 
means, the pedantic "beating of time" during 
worship by the leader must cease. It is a dis- 
turbance of the worship and offends its 
spirit. Let the drill be given in the class 
room and at other times than during wor- 
ship. Again, the musical feature of the worship 
is only a help ; it should never become a feature 
by itself. The solo, for instance, is a precarious 
embellishment and had best be discouraged. 
A selected choir is less likely to be a distraction, 
but it tends to assume the weight of respon- 



236 AIMS OF TEACHING 

sibility for good singing and to induce the rest 
of the school to lapse into listening. The sing- 
ing must be done by all the pupils, if the wor- 
ship is to have meaning for all. Each with all 
and all with each, applies to religious as much 
as to all social phases of life. 

THE RESPONSES. 

It is good to bridge over the music of the 
school into that of the Synagogue, and to 
familiarize the children with the main re- 
sponses and hymns which are sung in the latter. 
To be sure, this is equivalent to an appeal to 
the Synagogue to be less pretentious as to 
classic choral feats b}^ the Synagogue choir, 
and to put the chants within the compass of 
child voices. But in the end this simplification 
and this considerateness for the young gen- 
eration will bring a great gain to child piety 
and to adult worship as well. 

JEWISH MUSIC IN THE HOME. 

The School should also provide the Home 
with religious music ; the songs and the school- 
service responses should become household 
music, as it were. There need be no fear that 
they would thus become cheapened or lose 
their sacred character. On the contrary. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 237 

they would become endeared to parents 
as well as children, and it is not at all 
unlikely that they would, in the course of time, 
become the vehicle of serious thoughts and feel- 
ings as these inevitably arise in the experiences 
of every household. It is a mark of the 
decadence of modern Jewish family life that 
it assembles so little, I was going to say 
almost not at all, for solemn and serious com- 
munion, and I have the hope that we may 
touch the hidden springs of the sentimental 
kinship in our families by the magic of song. 
When once parents and children have begun to 
sing together, they will have entered upon their 
religious reawakening. It is here that the 
printed hymn book may be of use. But in 
order to satisfy this side of the usefulness of 
the hymn book, it must contain matter that 
has reference to family life. There should be 
morning songs, evening songs, and hymns and 
chants appropriate to significant household 
events. 

The school is one of the agencies of the com- 
munal life, and it should bear a direct and 
forceful influence on the home. 



238 AIMS OF TEACHING 



CHARITY COLLECTIONS IN THE 

RELIGIOUS SCHOOL AND 

CHARITABLENESS. 

Charity is not a virtue all along the line of 
childhood. There are periods of childhood 
when charity is disconcerting to it, and im- 
possible. From the point of view of life the 
sovereign law of child-nature is the main- 
tenance of self. But charity is a means devised 
by our morality to preserve the race on a higher 
level; we wish to hold free from pain and ag- 
gravation the life which we enjoy and we feel 
we cannot enjoy life and freedom rightly as 
long as they are disturbed in any person. 

The charity which is offended by the wrongs 
of the world and hastens to correct them or, 
wanting correction, to alleviate them, that 
larger charity which feels the keen edge of 
social wrong and evokes a fine impatience and 
a still finer patience, is the very culmination of 
moral maturity. The child goes through the 
successive stages of the feeling and has to 
tread a weary and long path up to that moral 
altitude. Adult charity is quite other than the 
charity which is conceivable by and possible for 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 239 

childhood. In adult charitableness there are 
three components, one of sympathy, another of 
helpfulness and a third of reparation. The first 
two are open to childhood, in some degree, at 
some time and in some directions. The last is 
not open to it in any way, even in sympathy 
children have their limitations and it is easy 
to mislead them into maudlin impulsive- 
ness. In the cause of helpfulness, too, we must 
not demand of the child too much, for the child 
couples kindliness so easily with pose. Charity is 
far from so simple a matter as class donations 
and "visits to institutions" make it appear. It 
requires fine discriminations. Like all other 
virtues, charity begins by being simple. The 
fact, therefore, is fundamental that child- 
charity is not identical with adult charity. 

CHARITY COLLECTIONS AND TRAINING. 

It is customary in many Religious Schools to 
make a collection for charity. This is done in 
order to inure children to the sense of benevo- 
lence. The charity contributions are gathered 
by passing the hat, or by dropping contribu- 
tions into a charity box. Some even make a 
solemn affair of it, a sort of sacrament. The 
point, why is the charity given by the children, 
for what purpose and what is their conception 



240 AIMS OF TEACHING 

of it, is ignored. But the main educational 
stress should lie on the aim that the giving of 
the charity contribution be attended by a sense 
of its significance. The act should represent 
a moral effort on the part of the child. 
But when he brings the pennies his parents 
have put into his hands and places them into 
the collection box according to school regula- 
tion, the moral meaning of charity has fled. 
Some teachers flatter themselves that the child 
has gotten some good out of it, for has he not 
delivered the money and forgone spending it 
on his way to school ! But even if it were true 
that the child donation represents a sacrifice, 
the act would be a discipline in self-control and 
not in charitableness. The child is still left un- 
trained in sympathy, which is at the basis of 
charity. The significance of the charity does 
not consist in the child's simply giving, but in 
his giving out of a certain feeling and convic- 
tion that he is doing a definite good to someone 
or perhaps to himself. This, however, the "col- 
lecting" does not provide nor satisfy. The fact 
of the matter is that the charity collection in the 
Religious School is a pious affectation, and 
does not impress the child. Right sympathies 
and readiness to act up to them constitute the 
important element of the moral life; to let 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 241 

these go and come as they please is intolerable. 
The collection of charity from children should 
not have a place in a school, and parents should 
not be taxed with the furnishing of the con- 
tributions, unless both the teachers and the 
parents are clear as to the bearing donations 
have on the growth of the character of their 
children. 

Some teachers allow collections to accu- 
mulate until they aggregate a considerable 
sum and then a sort of grave council is held 
by the teacher and the children in which the 
teacher suggests a worthy object, or cause, 
sometimes one which the news of the day has 
brought into public notice, and a donation is 
made in the name of the class or of the school. 
It is clear that such a donation has very little 
moral content, since it is of the very essence of 
a moral act that it be done by the child himself 
by his own initiative. Such a donation in the 
name of the class or school may bring a cer- 
tain gratification to the class or school, for, say, 
generosity or public spirit, but it has no bearing 
on the training for charitableness ; it may in 
fact lead to vanity. Again teachers go to an- 
other extreme; they take the children to see 
poverty and miser>^ The organize visits to 
hospitals, to orphan asylums, to the streets and 



242 AIMS OF TEACHING 

homes of the poor, to institutions and homes of 
the deaf, bHnd and lame and the rest of the 
wretched. I cannot protest against this too 
strongly. Children should be protected against 
maudlin sentimentality and gruesome experi- 
ences. The fact is, the teachers are at sea as 
to what charity really signifies to childhood, 
and have no definite policy in charity train- 
ing. This is not the place to go into an analy- 
sis of the subject, important as it is, but this 
much may be said: Charity requires a vivid 
imagination as incentive. The donor must 
realize, must feel, must have a picture, as it 
were, within himself, of the misery, the mis- 
fortune of the poor man, of the poor child ; he 
must have an imagination, so keen, so real, so 
dominant, that he goes at the work of help 
as an inevasible duty and feels in the completed 
performance of the charitable act a relief from 
the anguish he has felt. 

Charity must be an experience, and must 
issue in an act. A donation of money is a 
substitute, which we may concede to busy men, 
but cannot allow to children. Nor when chil- 
dren do charity, is it expected that they will 
reform society and better conditions. They do 
charity to reform, to better themselves. 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 243 

And a visit to a hospital will cater to 
the child's instinct of inquisitiveness, satisfy 
his morbid taste or provoke it if he has not 
felt it before. It cannot engender the real 
sympathies, because it is not a real experience. 
The visitor's eyes and ears are so engrossed 
with the novelties that he carries from them 
a confused sense of things which, when the 
best is said, bewilders. The child carries 
away from the visit not the refinement meant 
for him, but the dangerous thrill of pruriency. 
He had been allowed to stare at grief which 
should have been holy to him. He was free to 
indulge an impertinent, curious peep into sor- 
row, which he should have respected as private. 
He stood at the bedside of the sick whose pain it 
would be better he had learned to regard as a 
mystery of life, and as to which he will some 
day bear responsibility before man and God. 
Beyond all, he has not gotten the lesson of 
charity at all, for which he had been brought 
there. He goes away from the hospital, the 
"slums" and the rest, neither wiser nor better, 
nor more respectful to poverty, but less rever- 
ent and on a level of indifferent familiarity 
with them. 



244 AIMS OF TEACHING 

NOT SENTIMENTALITY BUT CHARACTER. 

Besides, this procedure to train children into 
a virtue is experimental and fragmentary. It 
lacks method and does not originate, as all edu- 
cational effort should, with the teacher, on the 
basis of methodic pedagogy. If charity is an 
essential quality of life, it should be taught not 
by the hap-hazard manner of a visit or a col- 
lection or a donation, but by a well-devised 
method of training. Charity cannot be taken 
out of the connection it has with constructive 
religious and ethical instruction. It should not 
be a bid of time-serving teachers to assure 
parents and the community that they are "do- 
ing things" with children and showing results. 
A class donation has nothing to do with the 
child's own adjustment to the sad and the 
sick. Charity and sympathy are qualities of 
child-life which should come out of the center 
of child-character and are more than flitting 
sentimentalities. The problem in this matter 
is not that the child shall be led to say: "I am 
sorry," but that he shall feel a personal eager- 
ness to be helpful. A gushy sympathy is noth- 
ing, but a noble intolerance of the ills of life is 
eager to mitigate and abolish evil. 

This thrusting of children into the midst of 



IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 245 

the perplexing problems which embarrass the 
adult world and tax the most serious and the 
most pious men and women is nothing short 
of violence to childhood. Children should be 
fed on faith in the world, on unclouded joyous 
acceptance of its gifts, and should have a rever- 
ence for sorrow and pain as a mystery which 
God has in His keeping and man can never lift. 
But, above all, charity must not be stopped 
short in mere pity. It must drive the sym- 
pathy beyond inactive pity into helpfulness. 




019 605 996 9 



Hi; 



iii|i; 



iifiiiiiiiiiiliiiiiliiiiliiiiiliiiiiiil i 



i^ttlllliilfiiiiiiiiiliiiiii: 



JiiiiiiiHillitiiiliiiiiiniiiiiiHiitniiitiiniihiWihiiiiiiiitiiiiilit 



